The Burial

Such a hot day to revisit the old barn.  The door is loose and swings open almost by itself when I release the metal latch.  The bright sunlight outside blinds me to the dark blankness inside.  It feels cooler and I relax in the shelter from the hot air.  Eventually my eyes adjust to the faint contrast of slices of sunlight as they filter through cracks and holes catching dancing dust fairies which hang above the earthen floor in stasis.  Their glimmer is the only movement in the quiet stillness all around me.  There are two empty but familiar stalls staring at each other on the far end of the building.  An old bit of rope hangs from one wooden support post.

It is so stale inside as if nothing alive has been here for hundreds of years.  This is odd because there is only weathered wood between the bird and insect noisy traffic outside.  There must be mice and dark beetles at home in small corners and behind the wooden boxes stacked to one wall.  I tilt my head to one side and listen, carefully and with slow intent.  Such a peaceful quiet is foreign to my city ears and I hear just a soft creak as the big door moves when caught by the small summer breeze.

It is not how I remember it at all.  This was once a busy place with milking cows, an old tractor with its insides open and undergoing constant repair, swallows leaving their mud bowl nests under the trusses to dive bomb the dogs beneath them, and above it all, unseen, was a loft of sweet smelling hay.  There was always movement and sounds and animals grunting. 

I cross the uneven earth and test the first step of the wooden ladder to the loft.  It holds very firm as does the rest of the ladder as I climb it slowly to the very top avoiding splinters from the edges of the wood.  I pull my knee over the edge at the last step and scoot up onto the floor.  There is no hay, just dust and pieces of wood.  The large door to the hayloft is gone and light floods the area making it easy to see that some animal, probably a vulture or barn owl, had recently made its home here.  It smells faintly of must and poultry.

I sit with crossed legs at the edge of the loft door, the hot sun on my arms, my eyes in the shade and look across the land.  It is fallow and growing mowed weeds these days.  Colored wildflowers fight for attention in the center.  It still looks familiar.

That crazy summer floods back in my memory.  I had learned that I was a woman by the way the young boy we had hired for the summer watched me out of the corner of his eye.  It was an uncommon electric feeling that fed my soul and changed everything I did each day.  It changed how I wore my hair, how I walked, and how I modulated my voice.  We got to know each other over the weeks in between heavy-duty chores and lost our self-conscious pretenses.  We shared lemonade, jokes, and a swim in the river down by the cherry trees.  We loaded bales of hay onto the wagon and laughed as we grew sweaty and tired by sunset barely able to walk back along the dirt road to the house.  By August, we held hands and kissed and he smelled of raw corn or green grass and soap.

Then we almost made love one afternoon in this loft.  He was the one who pulled away at the last minute as he felt my body give in and my arms welcome him close.  He was the smarter one, and I was the thoughtless romantic.  He had three years on me and plans for another three years.  I was still into romance novels and gossip and another boring year of high school.

It is tempting to think what might have evolved if we had made love.  I am old enough now to know what a tragedy that might have been back then.  That foolish romantic in me is long gone.  I never heard from him or about him after that summer.  It was as if he was a character in those romance novels I read and had faded into a fictional fog with the end of the summer.  It was as if he did not really exist except in my imagination.  It was as if he was a canceled summer series on television.  It was as if that girl did not exist either, because I was someone else now.  I had responsibilities, I was sophisticated, I was working on a plan.  I had buried that silly child somewhere far away like a faded valentine or pressed corsage that doesn't look quite as wonderful as it did on the day it was given.  Today I was a foreigner in a foreign land.

(Bits and pieces are true, of course, but the story is fiction.)