Barn Radio

Used to be, the only place I ever heard country music was in my neighbor's garage.  Everyone else I knew claimed to hate it, and I went right along with that opinion.  But somewhere, sometime, one time, working in a barn changed all that.  When I was a child I rode Appaloosa horses at Spring Valley Farm.  There in the tackroom, amid six-toed mama cats and show ribbons and leather, was a dusty radio, stuck on the country station. It never blared, it was just there with all of the other scents and sounds you encounter in a stable.

I found that same radio years later in a barn on my college campus, permanently tuned and covered in hay dust.  I curried and mucked and tacked up to Montgomery Gentry and Alan Jackson.  Of course, at midnight I'd return home, throw off my chaps and meet my friends for gin and tonics at the jazz club.  But there's a certain comfort country radio brings me that jazz cannot, and it's because you can find it in all my favorite places. 

Go to any barn in the country, any farm or dairy, any rural diner or hunting tavern, and I guarantee you will find my old dusty radio, quietly playing background twang.  The same old radio now sits up on a shelf in my kitchen and in my truck console.  I imagine, as I'm driving or cooking, all the farmers bringing their animals in for the night, the diner waitresses counting tips, the beer in a mason jar.   I imagine that we're all connected, the rural folks and I, as we finish our evening routines, radios crooning.  And I hope that one day I too will find my way back to the barn.