Ominous Goings-On

One of the books in my pipeline is a collection that I call Random Anecdotes. Many of the stories involve my girls as they grew up, but some of them are just stories about life and how it goes.

This is one of those stories, in which a slice of my ordinary life took a sudden, ominous turn…

Our minibarn is in terrible condition. The siding is rotting, the shingles blow off in pieces in a stiff breeze, and all the stuff inside gets soaked every time it sprinkles — which renders the whole structure pointless, really.

So to The Endless List of Things to Do we added: “Replace minibarn.”

In the course of time, after we had replaced the roof, and the toilet, and the sink-and-vanity, and the head gasket on the truck, and various other home-and car-ownership items on the list, we came to “replace minibarn.”

Since we’re replacing the barn, we get to address all those wish-list types of things sometimes come up. For example, the concrete pad that the minibarn sits on is 10 feet by 10 feet, but the current minibarn is 8×12. So it hangs off the back of the pad, but leaves two feet of bare concrete sticking into the yard along one side. Well, if we’re replacing it, we can just put in a 10×10 minibarn and make the best use of our available yard space. The current barn has a 2 1/2 foot door, which is blamed inconvenient for getting anything in or out. The new barn will have 2-ft double doors — a vast improvement! And it also turns out that a barn with 4-foot sidewalls, like our current building, is the same price as a barn with 6-foot sidewalls. So, hey, we get 6-foot sidewalls for no extra money! Why not?

I called to make the arrangements. Before they can build the new barn, they have to tear down and remove the existing one. So they’re coming to do that today, and next week, a crew will be along to build my new barn.

I was happy with the prospect, until it hit me — I’m about to tear down my barn, and build bigger.

Suddenly this all sounds very . . . ominous . . .

Random Anecdotes: Dispatches from the Front Lines of Motherhood coming soon from J.A. Busick