I saw it in my headlights on a Thursday night in September.
I was coming up our lane at a quarter to ten with a bag of dirty hospital laundry on the seat beside me.
The yard light was on, the way it always is. It throws a white circle across the gravel and climbs halfway up the south wall of the barn.
And the wall it climbed was gray.
Not old gray. Not weathered gray. New paint. Flat and even. Laid right over the old boards.
I stopped the car in the middle of the lane with the engine still running.
I sat there with both hands on the steering wheel. And I looked at it for a long time.
That barn was built in 1925 by my husband’s grandfather, Walter Jensen. With lumber hauled from the train depot in Tracy, Minnesota, on a hay wagon pulled by two Belgians.
It had been red every single day since.
It was red when Arlo’s father, Earl, milked forty Holsteins in it.
It was red the day Arlo and I got married and had our wedding pictures taken in front of the big sliding door.
It was red in every Christmas card we ever mailed. It was red in the framed photo hanging in the hallway of the Lyon County fair office, from the year Arlo’s steer took reserve champion.
And now it was gray.
And I’d been gone for eleven days.
My name is Carol Jensen. I’m fifty-eight years old. I’ve been married to Arlo Jensen for thirty-seven years. We farm three hundred and twenty acres of corn and soybeans on a county road outside Tracy, in the southwest corner of Minnesota.
And I need to tell you where I’d been for those eleven days.
Because people always ask me why I didn’t just stop it.
