Barn Envy

I love, love, love that I live in an area that affords me the opportunity to drive in all directions and have a reminder of what many think to be a simpler time.  But really, was it? 

I must drive by this barn at least five times a week.  Thinking of living in that idyllic setting seems, well, like a whole lot of doggone hard work!  Farming is 24/7 x 365.  I do love their serene settings, but I most certainly don't envy the hard life of farmers. 

While I don't have the guts, stamina or drive to live the farmer's life, I have no doubt that I could live in a barn and call it home.  Not, of course, in its bucolic state, but in a more looks-like-a-barn-on-the-outside but completely-modernized-on-the-inside kind of way. 

I have applied a number of filter techniques to make the barn photo above look more like a painting, some photoshop fun.  The orginal photo is below. 

I have wanted to photograph this next barn for quite some time.  It is on our route to my older daughter's horseback riding lessons.  I was so stunned the very first time I saw it because it really does have pink faded trim around the barn windows!  As far as I can tell, the barn is vacated, but I have to imagine that someone once cared for it because they took the time to paint pink trim.

This last barn photo holds special memories and is quite honestly, probably at the root of my fasination with barns. My grandfather was one of those men perceived by so many as a simple farmer.  He had a small plot of land on which he raised animals and grew food to feed his family.  He grew tobacco each year, sold it, I'm sure, to buy necessities, not luxuries, for his five girls.  Not a simple life by any means. Or was it?

My grandfather's barn doesn't compare in size or granduer to so many barns that I see as am driving each day.  But its tiny, simple frame sure holds an enormous amount of such wonderful childhood memories.  Climbing in the loft to see if the hen had laid her eggs, watching my papaw hang tobacco to dry, seeing his old green truck with big rounded fenders parked in one side, naming the new little piglets clamoring just around the corner, running in and out and all around the barn with my cousins...