A Rural Looking Glass

by Brandon Mackenzie (Canada)

Making a local connection Canada

Revisiting monuments from one’s childhood can be a jarring experience. I recently revisited my grandparent’s barn on Rush City Road. It was a gloomy October day near Avonmore, ON, a crumbling town whose only fame lies in the minds of the elders nearly departed and their children, whose own recollections have grown stale from lack of discussion. I, an offspring of the children, lived my childhood on the outskirts of Avonmore, and briefly dabbled in the odd foray into their world as the young grandparents grew elderly and all the old-timey traditions faded away, an ending... It was one of those small towns that swelled with communal events for children and young teens, from summertime pool bashes, town hall dances, and Christmas Eve sleigh rides. It was a town that was designed like a narrow airplane runway, with two light sections of cramped houses at the South end of the road, the opening, congested, quarterway to suburbia stunted by some possible apprehension to the implication of being city-like, perhaps. A single breakfast diner to welcome newcomers, Patsy’s Diner, is now gone. The old diner appeared smaller. The wind was minimal when I arrived at my grandparent’s barn, as it was not strong enough to cause a whistle but hard enough to make the tall grass and long wheat brush together. Only, there was no longer any tall grass around, nor was there any wheat or corn stalks: my deceased grandfather and brittle, broken-ankled grandmother had not groomed their lawn and trees’ grassy skirts since they foreclosed in the early 00’s. In old age, buzz cuts were the preferred method of lawn and field care. I parked my car in a patch of gravel, in front of an old New Holland tractor, which I had never seen leave the tent under which it sat for years. If the engine ran, I never heard it. Nobody ever mentioned why it was there or if it was a memento or a talisman of some kind. Travelling is sometimes ruminative, like it was that day, where the only answers you have are the ones you imagine to be right based on feeling. In that moment, I was partial to disillusionment. I assumed the tractor was an emblem of a bygone era of farming and personal passion, and my grandparents couldn’t bear to lose the last item they owned from the auction that saw their farm leave from their hands to their neighbour’s hands. The hay silo no longer stood tall; it was lain in a groove of mushy sod having recently been brought down by hammers followed by one week of extended battle with gravity. The intestinal hay inside the silo was cast upon the ground like vomit. It smelled like vomit and manure, since it was ten years old. The metal rings were broken and creaked and waved in the wind. The blue siding panels were blown across the yard. It was less a silo than a junk pile of scrap metal. The barn used to be red. It also did not flake like Patsy’s Diner. The buildings were becoming one and the same. My grandparent’s barn, I discovered, had not received any chiropractic care, so it collapsed. I peered in through holes in the barn where windows used to be, and I saw remnants of old cow stalls and milking tubes. I heard no birds and saw no lights, but the cobwebs still decorated the ceiling like they had never left. The entryway was blocked by a collapsed wall, so I could not navigate the old hayloft where my cousins and sisters and I would swing for hours into hay and the occasional support beam. I could not reach the backside of the barn, as the previous night brought heavy rains. I left the collapsed barn with a somber feeling in mind. That so much had fallen into disrepair in my absence. All I saw was a conclusive image like that of piecemeal rubble at the conclusion of a bomb, which left me wondering how I ignored the whistle of the bomb’s descent in my more youthful years. Did anyone mention the pending doom over coffee after church at Patsy’s Diner?