There are great old stories among friends who have grown up on farms, and one shared memory revolves around the bonus of having a barn serving as a rough-hewn sports arena.
In the dead of winter, when most kids were grousing about having nothing to do, country kids had an open invitation for a rousing game of barn ball.
For my husband, barn ball was a cousin-fest of laughter and thrown elbows, bull-headed determination and haphazard drives to the hoop. He and his brothers played with his Beach cousins in their barn, and their dad made one thing clear: While enjoying the day, their job included keeping an eye on the ewes on one side of the barn floor. If a ewe showed signs of needing lambing attention, all play was to be suspended.
On the other side of the barn, a bull was housed along with a heifer (or several), and the boys were to be mindful of that, as well. If the basketball took a bad bounce or was part of an unlucky throw, there was a chance the ball might end up in the bullpen.
It became a creative game of diverting attention to safely get the ball back out of the bullpen.
“We always made Donnie go in to get it because he was quick and nimble … and we made sure we never told his mom!” Doug says with a chuckle.
There were a whole lot of things they never told his mom, the sweetest saint of a woman there was in all the land.
One thing about barn ball is that the temperature in that cold barn quickly heated up as we hustled and drove for the basket. Rules were hotly debated. A bad bounce was inevitable on that ancient floor, and it could change the outcome in a tight scoring battle.
When I was very young, my only place in the mix was to be the ball runner, returning the errant basketball to the game floor as quickly as I could.
Doug said he can’t count the times a hotly contested match-up had to be called when a ewe decided it was time to lamb, and the boys knew better than to ignore the only rule Uncle Bill had laid down.
Doug recalls a time Donnie thought he would beat the issue by penning up a ewe that he decided was close to lambing before the game started. That game went into a four-day tournament, and the ewe still hadn’t had a glimmer of labor.
“Uncle Bill was not very happy with us on that one,” Doug recalls with a grin.
Games were so hard fought, you’d think there was a jackpot involved. A win came with nothing but bragging rights, but it was pretty darn glorious. Until next time!
