The Find

She was a barn find, her figure painted on the bare cedar plank wall below a fanlight. The sun over decades had turned her into a phantom, a patina parboiled into the timbers. Her painted colors now flecks in the mottle. She was once a farmer’s daughter, or an old love recreated, etched by light and deepened by shadows into imperceptibility. Her history is sun-washed away. Her bonnet and long dress of an age now hung upon times façade. I wanted to own her, keep her as someone else’s memory maybe. There was no way of course, old barn finds are out of time, far from any of the rushing day’s we inhabit. This treasure was buried too deep to take to any home, it had become priceless the way a great mature oak tree is beyond price until the charming engines of nature claim it for their own.