BARN AGAIN: CELEBRATING RURAL-INDIANA CULTURE

I guess you know you are a farm girl at heart when you look forward to a barn festival and tour of southern-Indiana barns. And all the better when you get to take the tour with a van load of like-minded gal pals.

That's the plan for Saturday, Oct. 3, and I thought if you are a farm-geek like me, you might want to know about the doings. A bunch of interesting barns are on tour in Madison and Switzerland counties from 9-5 tomorrow. Some are drive bys, and others, I think you can go inside. Then at 5, just outside of Madison, there's the grand finale, farm style, it's a Barn Fest, with food, music and more. I wonder what they mean by "and more?" A hoe-down? A shindig? Guess we'll find out. Yee-haw.

Check out the Indiana Barn Foundation on Facebook for details about the festival. (Scroll down; they curiously don't have it as the lead post). Basically, you'll need to slip by the Switzerland County or Madison (city, not county) tourism bureaus to pay a small fee for directions and addresses and you are off.

As for the photo with this post, it's my late grandfather, Roscoe Jobe, with his draft horses. This is one of, if not my very favorite old family photo. For one thing, Roscoe looks exactly like my own father, and for another, the photo is taken in front of the barn that was on our farm all of my growing up years. It's still there today.

I never knew Roscoe -- he passed on before I was born -- but Dad spent countless hours in that barn. It was, I suppose, his office, so to speak. I always found something comforting about seeing the barn lights aglow at night, spreading yellow light across the barnyard evenings when he was working late welding something that broke or doing whatever it was he did in his special domain. 

When I think of Dad, I see him in his barn. In this barn.

I came along when we had tractors, not work horses. I would have loved to have seen and known them. But now, it's all part of Indiana farm history, not the way things are today.

But tomorrow, we'll take a tour of the way things were. Can't think of a better way to spend an October Saturday. Maybe if you don't have anything else on your plate, you'll join us; we'll offer up a friendly howdy-do wave as we pass you on the back roads.

It's a rural thing, you know.