Paint it red.
Red paint will keep its coating. It doesn’t matter that it has been painted a hundred times, just three buckets of paint, “Barn Red” is the color, it will hold another year of a working barn.
There’s a stack of iron shoes in the corner, one or two pinned up on the wall, with the pointed toes up, that will keep the luck in. It may be small but it seems to work.
Lines of ropes still used, some dried away to nothing, the greasy portions still black, hanging down toward the ground, the fresh rope on the sixteen penny nail. The old
cupboard full of pins, and cat hairs, and cotter keys, and nuts and bolts with square heads and holes, tiny screws with flatheads and modern ones that no one remembers where they came from.
There are two stalls, the boards are almost rotted down, the big hinges hold their gates up, the cross haired board leading from the left to the lower right. They swing on one six by six post, and the floors about a foot to tall, but the wheel narrows full, and moving days are about over.
Yup. Red paint. Keeps her fresh. May not make it look new, but it keeps it alive.
Ralph Peck
Photo by Ralph Peck
Catoosa, Oklahoma
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