Reading: Leviathan by, Scott Westerfeld
On the Farm: Morning dogs on patrol
Thinking About: The motorcade for one of our small town fallen in Afghanistan, Spc. Aaron Aamot, 1st Battalion, 17th Infantry Regiment, 5th Stryker Brigade, 2nd Infantry Division killed November 5.

Returning to my previous post about visual art as stimulation for the writing mind, I took one tiny step toward a project I have been planning and thinking about for five years.

When my twins were babies and eldest was a toddler, I found it impossible to get them down for their morning nap. Eldest was needy, the house was too loud, no one could settle down. And so I took off from my old Victorian home in the city and began driving the north country, those two lane, winding roads I had never seen before. And as eldest and I sipped our coffee and hot cocoa and she looked through her pile of books I was struck by a recurring theme.

Barns.

The barns I saw were magnificent structures—enormous sky scrapers of wood. But the thing about them that really astounded me was that they were all falling down. Each one leaned precariously, windows long broken out, boards warped and bent from the rain, foundations cracked, and a sense of abandonment on their faces. I’d had a romantic vision of the countryside - I imagined white picket fences, perfectly painted red barns, cute old farm houses. But the real face of rural America is often something far less glamorous.

I fell in love with these barns and dreamed of photographing then in their decay and even returning years later to see how much further they were leaning, whether anyone decided to replace the roofs or drag away the rusted tractors.

I never felt I could stop to take these pictures because I had three babies in the car and the thrum of the engine is what kept those babies sleeping, and what helped me keep a tenuous hold on my sanity.

But I’ve never forgotten them. And when I moved to the countryside and saw more barns each time I went to the store or drove the kids to school, the itch to capture them became stronger.

I have a love story with photography and that’s part of the tale of the camera and barns. When I was seventeen, I moved to a new state, started my senior year at a new high school, my mother had cancer and I was desperately unhappy. Someone handed me a camera, a Cannon AE1 and a bag full of lenses (I think these had been my fat