The Barn - Part 1

There is so much fodder here, I am hesitant to break up what should be individual anecdotes. But who would read through such a monologue? The barn is, as always a source of constant amazement for me. It has been since my family moved to Winters and I started spinning yarns about bodies being buried under the planks of the floor and witches in the upstairs to horrify prim little friends.

You may remember the epic (and I feel justified in using that term) cleaning of the barns which occurred a few years ago, as seen here. Slowly the boxes, junk, and untold treasures have re-accumulated, a high percentage in the form of J, J & kiddos items as well as massive amounts taken from my B granfolk's storage. My one task was to remove this cabinet and refinish it for use.

Alas, before the cabinet can be reached, brave souls must face - the chaos. 

The writing on that chalkboard...it's the welcome I wrote for J's bridal shower, in 2005...

I can't even begin to enumerate the contents of all of these photos. But rest assured I have a story for about 80% of them. 

Example:

In photo #1 - those silver handlebars you see, that would be my dad's moped. Which he used to commute from Davis to Woodland. Gave us rides on as kids growing up in Davis. I can practically measure the years of my life by it. Most recently it went away to college with B as his mode of transport. 

As extremely helpful as my interest is, it comes with some kickback. Luckily, this has diminished slightly over the past few years. It previously seemed that anytime anything went missing the response came, in a scathing tone, "Oh, K probably threw it out". M used to get quite exasperated with my efforts. And poor G...the day she discovered that her doll's baby brother, or sister (I forget which), was missing was met with sorrow and cries of sincere pain and mourning. I had attacked her toys during one purge and cruelly separated two plastic siblings forever. Or there was the time I cleaned out the VHS tapes. "We used to have that movie, but K threw it out". It has been a theme for years, where I seem to act as the heartless destroyer of emotional attachment in pursuit of clearing away clutter. I do restrain myself from throwing away belongings my folks are kind enough to store for other people - like when they were keeping sheep skulls and sheering equipment for some friends, or now when they have mountains of J's stuff. 

Saturday it was such a pleasure to go through stuff, cleaning off tables, emptying the cabinet, rearranging things and uncovering treasures of the genuine and ludicrous kind.