The light in the barn

It's funny the things that will trigger a memory here on my old homeplace. This evening I was standing at the kitchen sink, where I've taken in the view many times in the six months since we moved back here, and noticed that I'd left the barn light on. And suddenly I had a memory that I hadn't had in all those other times at the same window.

Sofia and I had been out in the barn earlier in the evening, looking again at the batch of kittens we had found another batch of kittens this afternoon. Sofia is pretty excited about the find, but cute as those fluffy little mewing kitties are, I have to say I have mixed feelings about the discovery. We had already found one batch of kittens, earlier this spring, but the mama cat moved them at just the wrong time for us to tame them. She did move them back closer to the barn later, but life had gotten a good deal more hectic for us then, and when we missed just a few days of petting the kittens, they got too fast and wily for us to catch. So this new batch of kittens, which is still small enough that we should be able to tame them before they go wild, will be nice for Sofi. On the other hand, eight kittens on the farm -- and possibly more, since I am pretty sure there's another pregnant cat wandering around (I saw her swinging her belly about, moving more slowly than a cat normally would, and I empathized with her) -- is really getting to be too many. Nature does eventually take care of such a population boom, but its methods are not really all that pleasant to witness.

In any case, our job now is to tame the kittens we can catch (so they can get their shots and neutering later, as well as just be more pleasant cats in general) and Sofia is happy to pet the new kittens as long as I hold them. It was already getting dim in the barn by the time we made our second trip there, and I forgot to flip the light off when we left. Sofia and I went in for her evening snack, and that's when I noticed the light from the kitchen window.

That barn light had not been on, that I'd noticed, since we moved here in January, and it likely hadn't been on much in years. Dad and Arnold had retired from farming in 1998, but they had sold all the hogs already in 1992. Now the barn cats, and the barn swallows, are the only creatures that live in the barn.

Until 1992, though, those lights were on many nights in the late winter and early spring as pigs farrowed in the barn, and Dad went to check on them or to stay with a sow as she farrowed. Some of the lights stayed on all of farrowing season, heating the little piglets that slept and grunted under them.

I remember seeing those lights from the window on many nights. It was a comforting sight, really. I knew when I saw it that even though I was getting ready for bed, or even just in the kitchen for a drink of water in the middle of the night, the life of the farm was going on in the barn.