Why are barns painted red? or sometimes white? or green?

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Pullman Farm, Williamston

Driving home from the garden center on back roads the day before Mother's Day, sharing my tiny car space with a huge hanging basket of yellow and orange flowers for my mother-in-law, I must have taken a different turn than I have in the past.

Oh I love drifting along country roads. I'm happy to drive the same route to work and back every day. I get to watch farmers plant seed in black fields, then green rooster tails of corn rise in slow release, and windswept currents ripple through seas of bronze wheat. Horses bow their long noses as I pass. Honking geese fly in front of my windshield. Rainbows arc, sometimes in doubles. But the best country driving is on a Saturday with no destination, turning right or left where I haven't before. Like on the day before Mother's Day when I turned the Aveo onto Meech Road and drove past this white farm only to stop the car, turn around, go back, and take it in.

I was struck with the farm's simple cleanness. Even the sky was white. And then I wondered why they painted their barns white (or didn't paint, as the case might be).

The photo isn't crooked, the barn is.



Most Michigan barns are red, like the ones in the photo below in Six Lakes, which are "barn red" and also faded. The barns in the photos below those are painted Marilyn Monroe lipstick red. They're also newer.

true "barn red" barns in Six Lakes

Marilyn Monroe lipstick red barns. This is not an official barn color name, by the way.
















Ok they're not exactly the same shade of red. Maybe her lips are somewhere between the old barns and new ones.


So I did a little surfing and found some barn color history.

• until the early 1700s barns in Europe and North America weren't painted but were treated with linseed oil
• American barns got bigger than European ones - all those big hopes for big crops on big land, and preservation became more important
• some farmer discovered he could mix skimmed milk, lime, and red ferrous oxide (plentiful farm rust) for a durable coating (later on they added linseed oil)
• wealthier farmers even used the blood of slaughtered farm animals to color their "paint"; Native Americans had been using turkey blood added to egg whites and clay for red pigments (yeah, they called it "Indian Red")
• milk paint (otherwise known as whitewash) - milk, lime and pigment - goes back to earliest cave paintings and King Tut's tomb and didn't diminish until paint was mass produced in the 1800s
  
• 1868 was the year the first metal paint can was patented, the kind with the tight-fitting lid you have to open with a screwdriver
  
• so why white? some think white barns started with dairy farms in Pennsylvania and Ohio to give that clean sanitary feel: white barns = white, pure milk; like I said when I saw the Meech Road farm, it felt clean
  

I'm afraid I have no answer to the question Why is your barn green? I'm guessing it has something to do with the reason farmers do a lot of things they do: there was a special on green paint and it was very cheap.

our green barn and outbuildings shot in 2007;
we "bought the farm" in November 2003;
have you heard the idiom "bought the farm"?
phrases.org says it means
"To die, particularly in an accident or military action.
the origin might be:

. . . the idea that when a plane crashed on a farm the farmer may sue the government for compensation. That would generate a large enough amount of money to pay off the farm's mortgage. Hence, the pilot paid for the farm with his life."

I don't know what year the barns on this property were painted green. We inherited this old aerial photo of the place with an inscription on the back that in 1957 it was the property of one Joe Hutchison, and the barns and house were white. (Glad this pilot didn't "buy the farm" so we could have this old photo.)

this shot was taken the year after I was born, but I didn't live here then;
I lived about 40 minutes drive from here, toddling around my house in town)

closeup of our farm in 1957

Sadly, barns like ours - built about 100 years ago - are deteriorating, and it takes a lot of moolah and hard work to repair and maintain them. Many have fallen flat. I hate to see barns sided with metal or vinyl - I don't want to lose the open space between boards that allows light and wind through for one thing - but using more durable siding than wood is often the solution to keeping them alive. Don has done some work - with our nephew Paul - to support the once sagging corner of our barn. It will take a lot more to restore it. We'd like to find a barn preservation grant, but even if we do find a way to fund our big green barn's restoration, we'll respect its old bones.







I gathered information from GRIT, How Stuff Works, milkpaint.com and The Barn Journal.

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local organic produce - in May!

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Our friends Karl and Lloyd are off to Japan for three weeks, so they are "sharing their share" in the university student organic farm co-op. We give them a dozen eggs about once a month, and somehow this doesn't seem equal. Look at all this food for one week!

Front to back: parsnips, radishes, beets, Swiss chard, carrots, potatoes, green leaf lettuce, spinach, spring mix lettuce, chives and basil. Students raise these veggies in a hoop house on campus. Oh, I saw one of my English graduates who works there. I guess that's one thing you can do with an English degree.

I will confess to you that I am just dorkily romantic enough to pretend I was the Girl with a Pearl Earring chopping these jewels meditatively while Don was mowing the lawn. Have you seen the film with Scarlett Johansson? It's not a great movie I suppose, but the visuals are captivatingly painterly and sensual - and sensuous - and worth watching it for. The opening scene where Griet (Johansson) prepares vegetables is transporting. Oh, and so is the hanging laundry later - to peer through and hide behind, and then figuratively become womanly modesty begging to be torn away.




Oh dear, was I writing about food? But food is sensuous, no?


















In the Art of French Cooking I found a recipe for braised carrots. I added parsnips and would have added chives and basil at the end if I'd remembered. They were all chopped and ready in a pretty little white dish like they show on cooking shows. The basil smelled so good. Actually I don't know if basil and chives would taste good together. (Susan, what do you think?) I meant well but forgot to add them at the end. Gordon Ramsey would have yelled at me. What a dufus! (He would have used other choicer names.)

Then in The Silver Spoon I found a recipe for Swiss chard with parmesan cheese. It uses just the stems of the chard - you save the leaves for soup or something later on. This was scrumptious I must say, but what isn't yummy with parmesan cheese?














Besides these two dishes we had a tossed salad of green leaf lettuce, spring mix, spinach and radishes in balsamic vinaigrette. Nothing but veggies (though we're not vegetarians). We were strangely satisfied, even without rice or some other whole grain. Maybe because all this stuff was picked a couple hours before and just a few miles from here.

Here are the first ten minutes of "Girl With a Pearl Earring" so you can see the veggie scene, which happens in the first couple of minutes, in case you don't have time to watch more.

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time out

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Three days off, at home. It's warm enough to sit in l'atelier after a cold winter, though a chill remains. Bugs have come inside, and died. (I posted this photo at small.) I opened a window and could hear and watch birds finding live bugs in last year's garden. I cut lilacs and set them in front of the screen door where the breeze could sweep the room with their fragrance.


I sat nestled in my Indian crazy quilt, with another blanket on top of me, and watched prisms from the leaded window dance on the pine floor. I read Anne Michaels' new release, The Winter Vault. I had visions of the St. Lawrence Seaway and the displaced towns and villages in its progressive path. I slept and dreamt about Egyptian pharoahs, five kinds of date palms and floating down the Nile in a houseboat.


Or was I really floating?


The second day off I did my morning blog browsing and thought I'd open the New York Times online. When I was greeted with their new frenetic Twittery nytimes/timeswire box rapidly flashing numbers of times the site has been updated in the last hour with the question "HOW MANY HAVE YOU MISSED?"

I thought: What is happening to us? Are we so afraid of missing one crumb of information? What about understanding what is here, what has been here hundreds and thousands of years?

When my time out is over, and I'm back in time's sortings, I'm more determined than ever to balance days with mini time outs. Stop. Look. Listen. I think I learned that in kindergarten.

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out of sorts

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phrases.org says the meaning of "out of sorts" is:

Mildly unwell;
not in one's usual health or state of mind

The origin is:

"Since at least the 17th century 'sorts' has been the name of the letters used by typographers. This usage is referred to in Notes on a Century of Typography at the University Press Oxford 1693–1794 and is nicely defined in Joseph Moxon's Mechanick exercises, or the doctrine of handy-works - printing, 1683:

"The Letters... in every Box of the Case are... called Sorts in Printers and Founders Language; Thus a is a Sort, b is a Sort."

To be 'out of sorts' would clearly be unwelcome to a typesetter. That terminology could be the source of the phrase in its current meaning. The above citations are pre-dated by one from Samuel Ward, which makes no mention of the print trade. That in his The life of faith in death,1621:

"I wonder... to see one... that knowes all must worke for the best, to be at any time out of tune, or out of sorts."

~ ~ ~

Being "out of sorts" offers a chance to observe the elements of your life.

My BIL Joe talked at dinner the other night about the "thinking mind" in Buddhist terms. It's where I keep track of who's got an appointment at 9:45, then 10:30, then 11:15, etc. It's what I use to come up with options to solve a student problem, and it's the reasoning tool I use to get to logical conclusions - whether who to vote for or what dish to contribute to my mother-in-law's Mother's Day dinner.

It's also the potentially annihilating part of my brain where I overthink things. Why did so-and-so say that? What did she mean by it? It's where I get defensive, and it's what works overtime in times of stress going to bed at night. It's where I think I'm the center of the universe and interpret myself through the imagined perceptions of people around me. It's where I think laterally (and literally) and forget to close my eyes and listen.

Joe also talked about the non-thinking part of his brain, the place that is there "behind" thoughts and sorting. Maybe it's another dimension, where artists live in another kind of imagined reality, not one that denies facts but considers possibilities in non-data-like ways.

It's a place of the moment. It's organic. Where what is, is. It's where you get out of the sorted into your own space - empty, open and free.

I'm on vacation at home, and I need to give my thinking mind a rest. Maybe being out of sorts is a good thing. Seeing a tulip lying down on the job or seeing an "a" out of its Sort, lets you really see them outside the box, for their essence. Being that tulip or "a" out of the box could be good too.

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Let's play tag

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California Girl tagged me (and so did another friend I can't for the life of me remember who, can't find a comment, must have deleted an email - rats! tell me who you are please!), and then I think my mom called me in for bed because it got dark, and she'd heard the crickets chirping. Then the next night we played Combat instead, hiding in the shadows of the brick Methodist Church that looked like a Berlin building at night in black and white, and then the next night it was raining. And anyway, I am always the last one It - too slow to catch anyone in the neighborhood.

So, where were we? Oh yes, I'm 52, and we are playing blogger tag - not neighborhood tag. This tag game is to list six unimportant things that make me happy. Well, as one who has a blog called small the point of which is to note small things and their importance, hope you don't mind if I change that to:

6 little (but still important) things
that make me happy on a daily basis
and I don't know why anyone is interested
although I am interested when other people
post them because I can relate to at least some of them

1. the first thing because it's first in the morning is a cup of coffee with vanilla soy cream in this hand thrown mug by an art school classmate of Lesley's. actually i drink 2 cups. the thought of this gets me out of bed.

2. a tree named Cosmo on my drive to work. it's very very big.

3. colorful eggs from the coop. in a few months we'll have some darker brown ones from new layers.

4. photo of an old Chinaman smoking something on the wall by my dressing table.

5. uni-ball pens. every color. shopping for these at Office Max makes me very happy. i usually spend too much $ on them. i like using orange for underlining text that knocks me out.

and 6. Sarah McLachlan singing "Answer."
there are some days on my drive to work i listen to it several times in a row.

So did that interest you? Why? What small things make you happy?

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weekend breakfast

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You think you want something light for breakfast, just a snack, such as beads of dark berries in a tablespoon of plain yogurt, or a half cup of Grape Nuts in milk. When you were a girl you doused Grape Nuts in a whole teaspoon of white sugar, like snow on the Jungfrau. As with global warming and other transformations, your Grape Nuts have lost their snow, but you still like a small breakfast.

But on Saturday, you must be ravenous after sleeping in until 6, because the farmer-farmhand-farmer’s-wife-man has a contractual agreement with the Farm Guild that he will cook you a big, hot breakfast, the kind his Aunt Alvaretta cooked when he bunked a week at her farm as a kid, the kind that requires you to be gurneyed from the table on a farm wagon. Friday evening he gathered 18 eggs from his hens, and in the morning as soon as it was light he found 20 fresh morels in the woods and then punched out a dozen biscuits that smelled up the house like the homes of story books. If the man had his way, you'd also have had pork sausages from pigs he raised, minced with herbs from your herb bed. As it was, a quiche full of ham and veggies just out of the oven was firming up on top of the stove.

You're still learning the Farm Manual and haven't gotten to the part yet about whether throwing scraps of quiche to the chickens contributes to cannibalism, but you just can't eat all this food so early. After 3? Oh yes, you can eat this much and more then.

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mushrooms, mycelium & swine flu

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While trees are popping chartreuse leaves at the end of April, after a couple of rainy days and warm nights, we slide our farm clogs on and head into the two little woods behind us to scour the ground for morel mushrooms.



I have to wear my reading glasses so the dried leaves and mushrooms don't blur into one another. With clear vision, I can see how hideously brain-like they look. To one who detests mushrooms - disgusting! To one who adores them - tantalizing!

Don found these clusters of morels hidden beneath brush Friday;
I had gone over the same spot that morning and missed them.

We have never had the luck of some who fill bags and bags with morels. We know a lady who refuses to eat them but will hunt and pick for hours in her woods to harvest them, then give them away with a smile. The most we've found any given year is around 70. Don found the season's first six last week - the ones in the top photo, the biggest being around 2". Then Friday he found the clusters in the photo above.

The season lasts about two weeks, and there is much lore on where to find them (at the foot of an old apple tree, or around fallen elms among them) and how to pick them and not pick them. The clumps of morels Don found Friday were under the jagged edge of the old fallen apple tree. When we picked them, we broke them off and left the base in the ground so they'll continue to propagate.

You can tell real morels from poisonous imposters by their hollowness.

We soak morels in salty water to float out dirt and bugs, then dip them in milk, dredge in flour, and sauté in a little mixture of oil and butter (oil keeps the butter from burning), tossing on some salt and pepper. They are delicious and rival truffles, which sell for hundreds of dollars a pound. (Part of the problem with truffles is that being so expensive, you only get thrifty bits of them in a dish concocted by a clever chef who spreads them out, otherwise who could afford to eat them? And in such small samples, you don't get to really experience their flavor and texture.)

Did you know there are estimated to be one to two million species of fungi? Only about 150,000 of those form mushrooms. Of those, I don't know how many thousands are edible. And of those, only a fraction are cultivated and sold for consumption.

Like humans, fungi "breathe" oxygen and emit carbon dioxide. In fact animals, including humans of course, are closer to fungi in makeup than to plants, protozoa or bacteria.

Beneath these treasures of the ground is a lacy web of mycelium, the root system of fungi. These webs of fibers lie beneath forests and fields all over the planet, and some of them stretch for miles. The largest known living organism in the world is a fungus called honey mushroom, discovered in Oregon in 2000. It's 2,200 acres, that's 3.5 miles across - about 1,665 football fields, yet only one cell wall thick.

In an interview in The Sun magazine, Paul Stamets, author of Mycelium Running: How Mushrooms Can Help Save the World, and at fungi.com, explains from 30 years of research how mycelia are essential to the survival of our planet.

Stamets explains that mycelia quite naturally clean up pollutants in the soil. They also feed plants. And what is truly remarkable - when coupled with plants, they make them more resistant to heat and erosion. Grasses laced with mycelia are heat resistant up to 160 degrees fahrenheit, whereas without the fungus, they would wither above 120 degrees.

Stamets suggests we should couple mycelia with corn and other crops to make them "naturally" drought resistant, which sounds better than genetically modifying crops, but I wonder. If the fungi and plants aren't naturally coupled, are we messing with something that shouldn't be messed with? Maybe Stamets and other scientists have an answer.



I leave you with an exciting 18-minute YouTube video of Paul Stamets' TED talk almost exactly one year ago on May 8, 2008: 6 Ways Mushrooms can save the world. It is extraordinary and well worth your time to hear about the network of mycelia in the earth beneath you, and how these organisms benefit us, could help clean up our planet and even provide eco-fuel. There is a segment about their use against flu viruses, and I am very curious to find anything on the Internet connecting fungi with the current Swine H1N1 flu outbreak, since he mentions this strain specifically in the video. You'll get the feeling from his rapid speech that he is trying to tell as much as he possibly can about his favorite subject in too short a time.

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