Monday, August 30, 2010

Act One, Scene Two: The Milk Barn

Once we got Marge the Barge parked in front of the milk barn, it was time to attempt the liberation of my table. Mom had brought the six chairs back with her from Hot Springs on a previous trip, which we recovered with a pretty brown, floral fabric. Use your imagination kids, because this emancipation was quite a feat of nature...


This is the milk barn, where my great-grandfather bottled and sold milk. It is now full of stuff.

Here is the empty space where the table was after we removed it. As you can see, there's a lot of stuff in the milk barn. If you look really closely, you can see a dip in the floor. This is the side of the barn where the cows used to be, and that dip is where they did their business. My grandfather used to have to clean that out.


This is the hole through which we had to move the table. That's right- that's a huge tractor in the way. My grandmother literally handed over the keys to the barn, said good luck, and left. No one knows how to move the tractor except my cousin Josh, who was elsewhere during this process. So since the truck couldn't be moved and we couldn't go through it, and we couldn't go around it, and we couldn't go under it...


We had to go over it. Through this space. Right here. Holding the table over our heads, finagling it this way and that, praying to Almighty Allah that nothing terrible happened.

BUT we did it. It was incredible. This is just one final shot of the rear wheel of the tractor and the door of the milk barn. We then had to drive my grandfather's truck to the downstairs door of my grandparent's house, unload my other great-grandfather's chiffarobe (he is on my grandmother's side, whereas the dining room table and chairs come from my grandfather's side) from a back closet into the truck, drive the truck down to the milk barn, and load the chiffarobe into the back of the Budget truck. It was sweaty, it was hot, but it was worth it, for now my house in New Haven has two sets of great-grandparents represented.

Trivia: The dining room table was used by my namesake, Gracie Rowe.





No comments:

Post a Comment