lost barn

Every school day for five years, from grades 8 through 12, I drove past this barn twice a day:



I don't really have any stories about it or anything. I've never been inside it, or even been closer to it than that picture from my summer trip this year, but it's a landmark for me. I get lost very easily and am a visual driver, so when I head to my parents' house there's kind of a mental checklist I follow whether I need it or not, and that barn is on there.

I noticed the other day that the barn is gone. It's been torn down, and there is only a small pile of wreckage. I made this observation disproportionately loudly, and rather than rolling her eyes my mom, who is used to her strange child, explained that whoever took it down had been very careful to remove all the aged, distressed wood and to salvage anything within. I guess I'm not the only one who noticed the barn.

My town changes. It seems odd to make that observation in light of what I wrote the other day, but it's true. New buildings go up, houses are painted a different color, somebody landscapes the park in the summer, but I only feel weirdly unsettled when things are taken down. It's probably a sign of my realization of my own mortality, or some such psychological crap, but when my landscape is different my brain worries at it like your tongue poking into the spot where a missing tooth used to be. The mental checklist now has a gap, a dead spot, and instead of driving past that barn I drive past the spot where that barn used to be. It's not an important difference, but it feels like it is.

I get the same feeling when people from high school or earlier contact me on facebook and myspace. All of the people I know and all of the places I know are pretty much frozen in the head since I last saw them, so now I find myself constantly caught off guard by missing barns and eighth grade classmates with four children. Someone wrote to me that I've changed completely, and I couldn't believe that was true. I know I've gotten fatter and I used to have hair but other than that I have trouble pointing to any aspect of myself now and thinking, "That part of me was totally different ten years ago."

I realize that some things are different, but I've lived with them for so long that they don't register. They're no more surprising to me than the absence of a barn that was torn down three months ago is to mom, but that's because I lack the outside perspective. It's weird to think that I'm someone else's missing barn, but it seems to be true.

really good feta

“You know, when I lived in Chicago, there were so many Greeks there, I used to get the best feta cheese. You could buy a giant wedge of it for three dollars and it was so delicious and so good.”

As opposed to the feta cheese I was buying at that moment, which, I guess, was not as delicious and not as good. The clerk at Food City was so busy telling me about the feta cheese he used to buy that he bagged mine with my warm groceries instead of with my cold groceries. Do they not give some sort of bagger-training, or was he too busy yammering about better groceries at other stores during that, too?

I didn’t go to the grocery store to get feta cheese. That was more of an impulsive, “Hey, look, feta cheese is on sale! You should buy it and make that dip you like!” purchase. I went to the grocery store to cash in my change vase:



It’s come a long way since it was a fishbowl:



Anyway, last time I cashed in my change I had a much bigger jug and six years’ worth, rather than ten months. Since there aren’t any quarters in the jar I figured it was probably about twenty dollars or so, maybe twenty-five at the most, but it turned out to be forty-seven. Not a bad haul.

On my way out of the store I looked at the plant display, and thought briefly about getting a hanging plant for the hook on my porch. I had a cactus out there last year, but it died, and I keep meaning to replace it, but then I look two porches down at Porch Pots Lady’s porch:



She’s got so many plants out there that they overtake the porch and spill down the steps. I can’t even begin to compete with that, and it’s best that I not try since my plant will just end up dying anyway.