Good Afternoon, and thank you so much for inviting me here to speak todayŠ.although I have to say, I'm not quite sure WHY I'm up here. I'm not an architectural historian. I'm not a preservationist per se. I'm not part of any particular movement. They don't let us reporters get involved. We may have to cover something that we are involved in, which is a no-no. But maybe that's why I'm here: Because I'm a public radio reporter. And, as everyone knows, public radio reporters eat organic food, whole grains, and locally grown produce. We drive Volvos and drink microbrewery beer, if we drink at all. We majored in weird, offbeat things at college. We wear Birkenstocks, and a lot of fleece. And we live in converted barns.

Well, that sounds a lot more like our listeners than it does those of us who work at Maine Public Radio. Most of us can't afford that kind of lifestyle on our salaries. But I do happen to live in a barn that I renovated, and I was a religion major in college. So here's a capsule version of my conversation with Roxanne when she called to ask me to speak: "Naomi, will you give a talk to open the second part of our conference, please?" "Um, what ABOUT, Yvonne?" "Well, it's about barns, so SOMETHING about barns would be good." So here's my something about barns &endash; a little bit about my home, a little bit about what barns mean to me, and a little bit about what barns mean to all of us in Maine, if I may be so presumptuous.

When I got divorced seven years ago, I needed to find a new home. I was living with my family in a glorious old house with which some of you may be familiar: the Parsonage in Head Tide.. I's an eighteenth century white clapboard home with eight fireplaces, and an attached carriage house with three bays that goes on forever. There is a barn, a stable, and an old store, all perched at the edge &endash; some of it IN &endash; the Sheepscot River. I moved from California to be in that house &endash; but the thought of being a single woman taking care of that kind of property was terrifying.

So I went looking. And I didn't have to look very far. Down the road about seven miles, in the little village of Damariscotta Mills, was a tumbledown barn that somebody had already tried to renovate. When I say 'tumbledown,' I euphemize. But I loved it. Fronting on Borland Hill Road, just up from a millpond that would look at home in the pastoral English countryside, it was small, sturdy and hungry for care. I brought a succession of contractors through the place, some of whom had worked for me before. The reaction of one of them will sum up the barn's condition: "Why would a nice lady like you want to live in a dump like this, Naomi?" Even my friends had their doubts; one of them said, thoughtfully stroking his beard: "Well, you could live in it for a few yearsŠŠ" Until I got back in touch with reality, I guess.

I bought it, for a thousand dollars more than the previous owner owed on their mortgage. And I got to work. Or more precisely, the guys who worked for me got to work. There was no working kitchen and no working bathrooms. A tiny galley kitchen went in and two bathrooms. We cut windows into the largely windowless walls. Floors got painted, a furnace installed, bookshelves went up. I chose to put the public spaces &endash; the kitchen and living room, all one continuous space -- on the second floor. That's where I had soaring barn ceilings and beams, as well as a view of salt water out of one set of windows, fresh water out of the others. I tried to allow every barn-like element to show. That meant a lot of beams and posts, mostly. The childrens'' bedrooms &endash; they call them stalls &endash; were downstairs, along with a mudroom and my study. Everything we did to the barn made it look better, although getting there wasn't always easy.

Prime among my jobs was to keep my contractor in line with the barn-I-ness of the place. For example: He wanted to finish out everything to a much higher degree of finish than I believed the building needed. I asked my former husband if I could take an old floorboard out of our Head Tide barn and turn it into a countertop for my new home. He agreed, and I brought it back to the Mills. The next morning I gave it to the contractor, and asked him to install the wonderful, scuffed and worn board in my mudroom. I got home at the end of the day to find it beautifully planed and installedŠ..but I wanted the rough surface to be the top &endash; luckily, he hadn't planed both sides, so we just yanked it out and installed it splintery surface up.

But until I got asked to give this talk, I knew very little about my barn. A surprising lack of curiosity on my part, given what I do for a living. But sometimes, because of what I do, it's nice to come home and NOT have to ask questions. In any event, I figured I needed to do SOME studying up before I came here, so I bought Thomas Visser's book as well as a number of Eric Sloane volumes. I read them, and then called both Les Fossel and Joe Heaney. I asked them to come over and tell me what they could about my barn's construction. Both of them were very helpful, and here are the highlights:

My children were intuitively onto something when they called their bedrooms &endash; out of contempt for their tiny size, mind you &endash; "stalls." About an eight foot strip of ceiling on the northern side of the building is lower than the rest of the ceiling above, and Les believes that means that that side was meant for horse stalls. An added indicator of that use is the fact that the undersides of some of the beams in that area are rotted &endash; most likely from the ammoniated condensation that built up from the heat and moisture generated by animals.

Just as we grow and change, so has this building. So it's hard to definitively date the barn. Given the kinds of large, handhewn, pegged timbers that make up the rafter and purlin system, though, it looks like the barn was built around 1825 to 1830. Evidence of this is also found in the crude circular saw marks on some of the timbers, which apparently date to that period. There are three lovely ships' knees on the second floor, some of which may be made of that deciduous conifer, the Tamarack. According to Joe, the so-called "swamps of Waldoboro" were a fruitful source of what's locally called Hackmatack for ships' knees, and could quite possibly have been a source for mine. In any event, they were likely fashioned just down the road -- the top of Great Salt Bay, where I live, was a well known shipbuilding center.

There are pencil marks on the timbers; which I took to be a 20th century form of marking. Les says they could date from as early as 1810. There's whitewash on a portion of a number of posts and beams which could indicate that at least part of the building was made into a room for a person to work in. The huge stones of the foundation &endash; Joe says he's got a case of "foundation envy" looking at them &endash; are most likely not original -- they have drill marks in them, and were quarried. Early foundations often were made simply of smaller stones, found on or near the property. The front of the building has a degree of trim on it that lends some formality to the barn. Does that mean someone conducted business out of here &endash; a livery stable? A blacksmith shop? While I now know a lot more about my building's construction, I still don't know much at all about its use by humans. Who built it? What did they use it for? I've clearly got more of this story to learn before it can be fully told.

But here's what I can tell you about this barn: I love it. I love living in it, walking under its heavy beams, working next to its ships knees. The head of my bed butts up against the old hayloft door; I am constantly aware that this building housed animals long before it housed me and my children. I like its simplicity, its sturdiness, its straightforward lack of pretension. I like the fact that it was a useful building for a very long time, and that it sheltered working animals, tools, the fruits of the harvest, perhaps. The poet Marge Piercy writes that "the work of the world is common as mudŠ.But the thing worth doing well done has a shape that satisfies, clean and evident." My barn is clean and evident, it is archetypally satisfying in the common-ness of its shape. When I return to it at the end of the day, I am deeply at home.

And I believe that is what we all love about barns. I don't know about the rest of you, but I did not move back to New England, to Maine specifically, because of its shopping malls. I moved here out of a burning need to be connected to the landscape, to have access to water and mountains and valleys. To raise my children in a place where the word "environment" didn't describe something other, something separate from our selves. And barns are a part of that landscape, a visible reminder of a time when our connection to land, to food, and to animals was more palpable than it is now. I recently went to a concert given by folk singer Dave Mallett. And I realized, sitting there listening to him, that his songs are made of the very things that make barns so compelling to us &endash; they're about growing things inch by inch, making hay when the sun shines, rounding up animals after the lightning has struck, stealing kisses up in the hayloft on a late summer's eve. He didn't write that last one, but he should have.

Barns sing to us, too. They sing to us about a way of life that's almost gone from Maine. They sing to us about a time when what we did INSIDE a building was intimately connected to the world outside of it. Think about our lives in our homes and our workplacesŠnow. We can be so insulated from the natural world &endash; we turn dials to get warm; we watch screens, both computer and television, that are filled with images from across the globe; we eat food that's been flown here from other continents; we heat our homes with fuel that comes from the other side of the world. No matter how big the picture windows are that we install to let in the view outside, we are removed, in fundamental ways, from our surroundings. Barns, on the other hand &endash; some of them largely windowless, at that &endash; are a built response to the world around them. They are as close to being a part of the natural landscape as a building can be, in a way no MacMansion could ever compare to. And that, I believe, is the reason why it feels so good to see barns; they FIT in a way that's right with their landscape. They have a shape that satisfies, they celebrate work that is common as mud.

Now, I could be accused of falling prey to nostalgia. I have no problem with that. I am nostalgic for a lot of things that are better than what we have now: nostalgic for a time when politicians actually stood for something, and said things of substance. Nostalgic for a world where tomatoes tasted like tomatoes &endash; not cardboard &endash; and apples like apples, not sawdust. Nostalgic for an era when towns had defined limits, and you could walk your way around them. When was the last time any of you visited the Turnpike Mall in Augusta? That dreadful place does not stand for progress. I really do like Damariscotta better, even though it doesn't have an Old Navy. We have Reny's instead. In any event, nostalgia for the integrity and suitability of barns isn't starry-eyed romanticismŠ..it's an appreciation of something very real.

On the other hand, I am aware of what a hypocrite I am. Let me tell you a story by way of explanation. At the Union Fair about five years ago, my then eight year old daughter Hallie won a pig in the pig scramble. Oh my gosh, I've never seen her so excited. She ran up to me with this adorable, squirming little pink piglet clutched in her arms and said "Mom, can we? Can we? Can we take it home with us? He's SO CUTE!" An eight year old with a squirmy piglet in her arms is not a rational person. (Neither is her mother). So Hallie was not aware of what life would be like in our barn when the pig weighed four hundred pounds and, covered in slop, would wander around the house, rooting around in Hallie's pretty purple bedroom. I tried to explain this to herŠ.."But we live in a BARN, Mom! It'll be like Charlotte's Web, except inside!" I was trying to figure out which response to use next &endash; "The answer's no because I'm the Mom and I say so," or "Hallie, sweetie, we're Jews and Jews don't have pigs as petsŠ.." when a sign that there really is a God emerged. A farmer walked up, offered Hallie ten bucks for the pig andŠdespite Hallie's protests...in a flashŠ.he/she/it was gone.

So I am aware of how hypocritical I sound when I say I celebrate that connection between building and land &endash; and live in a barn that's filled with art and books, not tools and animals. But even in my converted barn, as I pass the iron hook that once held ropes; as I pick my way across a dirt floored basement that to my nose still smells like animals; as I sleep next to a drafty hayloft door, I know to whom this barn belongs. And it's not me &endash; it belongs to its history, the history of this hardworking landscape, and I am but a very small piece of that story.