HE'S OUT BACK

HE’S OUT BACK

            Depending on who you were listening to it had several names. Pa, my grandfather, called it “The Shop.” Dad always called it the “Old Machine Shed”. To my Mom it was “The Shed,” the one she grew up with, the one that was always there. To Grandma, who knew best, it was forever “Out Back.”

         From when I was little on it, was adventure. It was musty, with its dirt floor and silky cobwebs dangling from the beams. Sunlight streamed through dormer windows and glistened off particles of dust that wandered into its path.

         The odor of leather harnesses lingers. Rubbed with thick oil once a year, to keep them “soft against the hide.” Still ready, they hang from wooden pegs, even though the two greys that wore them had disappeared when I was very small. I hold fuzzy pictures of them in my memory. Tall like pillars, their lips wet, their massive, weighty bodies shifting side to side, impatient to be at their task. Pa talking to them like they were family. To him, I’m now sure, they were.

         Red rusted machinery  that looked like it had never seen paint occupied most of the space. A great deal of it was Grandma’s dowry, passed on to the young couple by her father and his brothers “to help the kids get started” when Pa bought the land on contract.

         I would sit on the cast-iron seats while Pa explained, step by step, how the machines and the mother and daughter horses who pulled them worked together. His voice softened when he spoke of the “girls”.

         On the outside, there are still some scattered spots of the red it used to be. The rest is so weathered paint would never stick to it anymore. When I ask him, Dad says, “It would be horrible expensive to get it back into shape and the doors aren’t big enough for the machines we use now. But she is sound and the roof holds it dry. Best to just leave it be.”

         I suppose someday economics will dictate the dowry will have to fall to the torch and leave the farm for good on the scrap dealer’s truck. The walls will weaken even more in time and have to come down. I know Dad could never do it. That job will probably be passed on to me after I finish my last year of Ag at the U and I come home for good to the house on the corner where Pa and Grandma lived.

         Today, I’m here to say a last good-bye to Gram and I guess to stare at the shed and remember. Times of long ago pass through my mind and I wonder if she is “Out Back”, finally together again with Pa.