The Barn Where The County Got Married

Chapter 1

For forty years I kept a key on a nail by my kitchen door that did not open my house.

It opened the side door of my hay barn, and I handed it to strangers more often than I handed it to myself.

My name is Verna. I am seventy years old, and I have lived on the same quarter section outside Chambers my whole married life.

This is the flat green part of the state, where the roads run straight for miles and the churches hold eighty people on a good Sunday and everybody knows whose truck that is coming over the rise.

The barn is older than I am. My father raised it in the spring of 1931, cut the beams from our own timber, and set them by hand with a team and a block.

It is a big gambrel barn, red once, gray now, with a loft that could hold a whole winter of hay and a window up high that catches the last light every evening like it was built for exactly that.

It still smells like clean hay and old cedar, even all these years after we quit keeping stock.

I want to tell you about that barn, and about the key, and about the morning I finally looked up and understood what had been happening over my head for forty years while I thought I was the one giving things away.

I was not the one giving. I only found that out this June, in my good dress, sitting down hard on a hay bale because my legs would not hold me.

But I am getting ahead. Let me start where it started, which is with a girl who had no money for a wedding and a father who had a broom.