I don’t know what happened back in the days when American settlers moved from east to west across our country, but I get a sense that once our nation’s human migration hit St. Louis, rural folks seemed to lose their need for “bling” in the buildings they put up.
I mean, just look at the old barns still standing in the East and the Midwest. Many of them have over-the-top touches of decorative fancy-pants-ness (see the photo above I shot on a recent trip “home” to Ohio.) On the other hand, where I live now in the Pacific Northwest you just don’t see a lot of hex signs on barns. Come to think of it, you don’t see many barns with fresh coats of bright, red paint either.
Take my own Seattle-area barn, for example. The structure was here when we moved to our place 13 years ago. It’s a ragtag, discordant symphony of white corrugated metal, old beams, and other pieces of this and that, probably rescued from a scrap heap someplace. Still, our barn is functional, reasonably weathertight, and gives our critters a place to get out of the winter rains.
Several days ago we were working in the barn and Leah found a barn swallow’s nest that had fallen out of the rafters and onto the barn floor--a carefully pieced-together birdhome of no-nonsense twigs and mud, but lined with soft, white feathers. Those feathers surprised us and seemed like a bit of bird self-indulgence.
Maybe our barn swallow moved here from one of those fancy-pants barns in Ohio.
