My Barn
The old pole barn on the back acre of my childhood home was the site of a million make-believes. Nothing lived in it but a couple pet rabbits, our stray dog before we invited him inside the house, and whatever rodents temporarily escaped our hunting cats. But every fantasy plot line of my Trixie Beldon and Boxcar Children-soaked elementary mind came alive among the hay bales and rough planked pens. In my brother’s handed-down Levis and bare feet, I pretended plotlines from runaway-on-a-train to wilderness-raised-royalty to little-house-on-a-farm, and every single one had a horse in it. Most often, I imagined alone in the barn (that’s how to be sure no one derails the story), unless I let a neighbor friend interfere or my little sister tag along, or my brother came to rig up a zipline in the rafters.
But on Christmas Eve, all the people I knew best, who were also the best people I knew, joined me in my make-believe. Our newly forming church had no room to meet in when the public school cafeteria was closed, so we brought in extra hay bales and dragged them into pew-like rows and tidied things up as best we could, for it being a barn and all. The dust and musty straw were, in this case, part of the ambience, though, as were the rented animals. Sheep of course, a couple jostling goats, a long-lashed cow, and a sweet, slow donkey not so different from my pretend horse, who usually stayed in that stall in the corner. Oh, and one year a tall camel that required its own handler who held its lead-rope tightly with both gloved hands and shook her head when we approached to pet.
We did our best to set the whole straw-filled barn on fire with a hundred votives lit and lining the eave just under the tin roof’s edge and a winding path of brown paper sack-and-sand-and-candle luminarias lighting the way from the parking field. In fact, the local firemen took to coming to the worship service each year, “just in case” and probably to sing, too. Sometimes, I think, we ran an extension cord for an electric keyboard, but mostly I remember that on that night every year, my mom played guitar and sang, even though her hands were cold. A lilting song of Mary’s boychild, and O Come All Ye Faithful, an invitation for all of us to join in. And my Dad wore his blue jeans for this service, not a robe, and looked right at home in the barn as he read to us familiar words of shepherds keeping watch and Glory to God in the highest and the light shines in the darkness.
And I could bury my fingers in the sheep’s thick wool and breathe in the familiar scent of hay and easily slip into the story my father retold us. The one where Jesus is born humble enough for a whole world to receive him and his light shines steady and spreading from person to person holding waxdripping candles and raising voices husky with wonder — Silent night, holy night / All is calm, all is bright….
It was the old pole barn on the back acre of my childhood home, and the Christmas Eve miracle we all felt there, that made me believe.