Uncle Earl had a barn right behind his house.  We didn’t have one at the Little House, but Daddy and Uncle Earl did a lot of their farming together back in those days, so we didn’t need a barn.  Our mule, Pete, stayed at Uncle Earl’s and spent nights in covered shed that was part of the barn.  Uncle Earl’s mule, Molly, stayed there too.  But independently of the mules, the barn was a fascinating place.  It had a loft, and there was all kind of stuff up there. The mule shears were there, long after the mules were gone.  It was a great place to play, there was a door that opened from the front of the barn into the loft, so you could put stuff like hay up there.  There was a shelf, or porch, just below the loft door that someone could stand on, and that made it easier to get things up into the loft.  But it was also a good place to jump from, if you were brave enough.  If some hay wound up on the ground below, it was even better!

On the ground level barn floor there was a corn crib, and there was a place where we stored cotton that had been picked, until we got enough to carry to the gin.  The cotton crib was a fine place to turn flips, and no matter how you landed, it didn’t hurt.  But the cotton didn’t stay in there all that long, so we needed another place to turn flips.  Wade, four years my senior, tried out the corn crib and was pretty good at it.  I couldn’t do a flip in the corn crib, so he decided to show me how, with accompanying oral instructions.  He perched on the partial wall that retained the corn in the crib so it didn’t scatter all over the barn floor, and proceeded, while talking.  “You go up, and over, like this…….” whereupon, he landed squarely on top of his head!  It was not like landing in the cotton, to say the least.  He walked around with his shoulders almost up level with his ears for two or three days!

We were delighted, on one occasion to find kittens right behind the barn.  Aunt Daisy feed them milk for some reason, and I don’t remember the ultimate disposition, but I don’t think Mama would let us keep one.

Sometime after we got a tractor, and Pete and Molly, the mules, were gone, Uncle Earl housed his milk cows in the shed where, the mules had stayed. One night he heard a commotion down there, and as usual in cases like that he called for Daddy. I’m not sure that Daddy had arrived by the time that Uncle Earl figured out that there was a fox in with the cows, and they were very much afraid of the fox.  Somehow Uncle Earl, while perched in the adjoining fence, managed to shoot the fox.  As expected, the fox tested positive for rabies.  And the cow, as they used to say “went mad.”  Rabies was a very scary thing.