Riding into a stiff wind on E-town Road on Sunday morning, I glimpsed this weatherbeaten stone and brick barn as I passed between it and a pen of hogs and sheep on a curving incline. Maybe I noticed it because I was in the open air and moving at a third of the speed I'd have been traveling behind a steering wheel and windshield, but the elemental geometry of that assemblage of forms, and the pattern and texture of the stone, the crumbling brick, whitewash in worn segments on the standing silo and the remnants of a structural tile silo next to it really grabbed me - I made a mental note to go back sooner than later with a sketchbook.
I went sooner. Freed from cooking by an invitation from friends to have dinner at their house before watching the debate on TV, we bundled up and took a chilly open top drive back out there in the late afternoon. Parked in the grass next to the hogs and sheep, who ran towards us thinking that they were about to be fed. Instead they got to watch me sit on the front fender of the MG with my back to them, gazing at the barn up the little hill across the road.
Lancaster county is peppered with hundreds of similar old stone barns. Why this one captivated my attention I can't quite yet articulate, and a hasty sketch done while the wind flapped the page and my fleece jacket tells me only that I need to return. Clarity sometimes only comes with repetition.
