Sundays in My City: Chesapeake Tobacco Barns

I see them everywhere, and they whisper their stories.

Tobacco barns dot the landscape of my adopted hometown. Although Maryland actively encourages farmers NOT to grow tobacco, the barns remain.

 

By design, they are meant to be a bit raggedy. The gaps and holes help dry the tobacco. Like people, they are more beautiful and functional when broken.

Of course, most stand empty now, serving as places for teenage tomfoolery or childhood exploration. 

But yet, as I drive by the barns, as I do every single day, I listen, because they have stories to tell.

I listen for the gossip and banter of the workers as they labor. I admire their strong, almost assuredly brown or black hands.They whisper their hopes--that their children no longer work so hard for so little.  I whisper back, "Things are looking up. They aren't perfect, but they're better."

I listen to the stories of the old-timers, those that remember a county before the Naval base or the power plant. They remember a landscape as fresh and unblemished as an Osprey's egg, and a time when people were less in a hurry, less angry, just less. 

Every time I listen to the whispering of the barns, I am reminded that petty worries and daily stresses don't last. Greater things than this endure.

For this, I am grateful.

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Thanks, as always to Unknown Mami for hosting Sundays in My City, a chance to see the world (electronically, anyway).