Not that anybody asked why my grandfather’s house was suddenly barn red, but I’ll tell you anyway. First, a bit of background.
When my husband Al was in Vietnam, Mama made a resolution to write more often as her contribution to keeping my spirits up. This meant maybe once a month instead of twice a year. In her defense, she had a lot on her plate, but the truth was that though she could write a fine letter, she didn’t like to. On one particular day when I took her letter out of the mailbox, I was in the midst of a “poor me” time between the nightly newscasts carrying discouraging reports from Vietnam and the three small children who had confined us at home by trading chicken pox amongst themselves.
Mama’s letter described her trip out to the farm to check on Papaw who was elderly by now. I mentally followed her as she turned off the highway onto the meandering half-mile lane to his house. She drew a picture of rounding the last curve to behold the dairy barn newly painted in bright barn red and looking just beyond it to see the dogtrot house painted the same color. I burst into some much-needed laughter.
It seems a barn painter had come by and offered Papaw a bargain price to paint his barn. Papaw agreed. When the painter finished the barn, he told Papaw he had just enough paint left over to do the house as well – also at a bargain. After Papaw’s death, my parents retired to the home place, and their grandchildren came to visit. They soon learned not to lean on the porch wall or posts painted with the “bargain” paint. It rubbed off on anything it touched.
The red paint came to seem normal, and this next generation loved the old place like the generations who had gone before them. Oddly enough, the red paint takes me back to clearer memories of the humor than of the difficulties of that day.