Yearning for a Barn Raising

What agrarian communities have to teach us about collective work and community building

This past weekend, I had the chance to help with sugaring at a farm in our community. Sugaring is the process of collecting sap from maple trees and boiling it down into syrup. The sap starts flowing as the temperature oscillates above and below freezing. And when I say “help,” I only mean that I collected sap from about a dozen trees for maybe thirty minutes before I headed home for my 7-month-old’s nap time. But just being out on the farm, working on a collective task, started a flood of childhood memories. Memories of working with family and community to make something. Memories that I didn’t know were stored in this sacred place within me.

As a kid, I remember working with all of my cousins and aunts and uncles to harvest cherries from the cherry trees on the farm. In between bringing in the buckets of cherries, I would sit on my great-grandma’s lap while she let me spin the cherry pitter round and round in hopes of capturing most of the pits. The cherries were then frozen or turned into pies or jams for the year to come.

I remember the day that all of my family gathered and butchered two hogs, grinding them down for sausage and distributing it amongst the many generations of our family that were present to share the work. Everyone had their task to complete. My little four- or five-year-old hands were put to work using the hog scraper to de-hair the pigs to get them ready for the next step in the process. At the end of the day, each family had meat to stock their freezers.

I float back to Apple Butter Days, which marked a highlight of autumn. We would go and spend the day outside around a big cauldron of apples cooking down to make apple butter for canning and distributing throughout the community. While too young to do much helping, I remember romping around outside, playing with the barn kittens, and occasionally stopping in to say hello to the adults that were simply visiting and stirring, doing work that could not be hurried along. 

I reminisce about the countless other “work days” that we did together as a family. Whether it was cherry picking, making firewood, raking leaves on Thanksgiving weekend, or picking blackberries, all of these collective tasks involved many hands working together to make, create, or build something.

My grandparents were each one of seven siblings, which meant that the population of the small town in rural Missouri where they grew up was made up of aunts, uncles, cousins, second cousins, third cousins, and every sort of relative you can imagine.

A couple of months ago, I was looking back through a photo album of the cabin being built, a cabin that sits atop a property that my parents and grandparents own. I like to think about it as my papa’s greatest carpentry project. While everyone says it was my papa who built it, the pictures make it clear that it was not just him, but an entire village. There are photos of a dozen folks, mostly my grandparents’ siblings, hoisting up the crossbeams that make up the core structure of the cabin. It was a project that was only possible with many hands. My parents describe the building process as a barn raising, only achievable because of all of those who were willing to show up and lend a hand. I was too young to remember the cabin being built, but I look back at those photos and can feel the collective sense of purpose and love that was going into the wooden structure being erected. A place where I ended up spending most of my weekends as a child.

I have now chosen to live in an urban area with my family where I can walk and bike to town, meet friends at coffee shops, and drop in at neighbors’ to say hello. I love not having to get in a car most days. I enjoy walking to the gym and biking to and from work. But thinking back to these memories gets me thinking. I am now examining what is different about a community you meet for coffee and dinner, compared to a community that you build through collective physical work. Often the physical work may not even have personal gain, but it is work that everyone is happy to do because next season, it may be your project that needs many hands to complete. 

Yesterday, getting a small taste of helping with the first day of sugaring, made me reflect on what I am missing by living hundreds of miles away from my expansive family in rural Southeast Missouri. Living far away from the landscape that I was so connected to as a child makes me yearn for something. And now that I’m raising a little human of my own, I am beginning to wonder what he will miss in his childhood if we don’t find a way to cultivate this collective work here. Work that is done with our hands and is often done in connection with the land. Work that taught me so much about what it means to be a family member, a friend, and learn what is possible when many hands come together.

I’m now looking for a modern-day barn raising, not just for the sake of doing, but for the sake of the community that is built up alongside whatever tasks there are to be done. I don’t know what this means yet, but it is a strong enough stirring for me to sit and write for the first time in years. A stirring that I hope to hold on to as I build a family of my own.