Pulling Down the Barn: Memories of a Rural Childhood

Anne-Marie Oomen is a poet. I haven't read her poems, but I do know she is a person of rare sensitivity with a reverence for language and the spoken word, because I have read her memoir of growing up on a farm near Hart, not far from the shores of Lake Michigan. From the very first lines of Pulling down the Barn, I could "feel" the poetry. Listen. "She is an old hill of a woman, leaning against the sewing machine, singing softly in a language I cannot understand. Her once ample body slopes from the shoulders down, inclining into drooping breasts and folds of stomach. Her hands are as faded as late fall, her skin loose and fissured as a poor field." In this description of her earliest memories of her dying grandmother, Oomen sets the tone for her story, a tone of wonder and awe and a firm connectedness to family and to the earth that nourishes us all. A strong religious upbringing too is entwined throughout her tale. She speaks of farming as "an unspoken religion... each crop shaping a gospel," and fields which "speak a liturgy" and "are our gods." Barns become "the cathedrals of farms." This pantheistic thread, which could be off-putting and troublesome in the hands of a less skilled writer, works wonderfully for Oomen and serves to stitch together all of the small, exquisitely crafted essays that make up her story. The eeriest thing for me about Oomen's memoir, however, was the absolute ease with which I could relate to nearly every small vignette of family and farm life. Have you ever heard the phrase, "We went to different schools together?" Well, that's how it felt for me as I eagerly devoured this book. Let me try to explain. Oomen describes the sensation of the first time she had the wind knocked completely out of her after falling several feet onto the barn floor from an improvised rope swing between the haymows. She tells of the pain, the panic: "I cannot breathe. I know that I have died." The same thing happened to me when I was about eight. Playing hide and seek with my brothers in the dark around our cabin on Indian Lake, I ran full force into the edge of our brick chimney. I still remember that fleeting feeling of panic, the inability to breathe, the sudden real fear of dying. Another example: She tells the story of her brother's horrific winter accident on a toboggan which left him with two broken ribs and a ruptured spleen and necessitated an emergency trip to the hospital and caused untold trauma to her parents. When I was twelve, a gruesome sledding accident tore open my leg. I needed over thirty stitches and was out of commission for months. She tells several stories about her fiercely competetive brothers, Rick and Tom, and how they were always trying to outdo each other, often engaging in the infamous "double dog dares" once ubiquitous to childhood. One of these angry confrontations left Rick with a permanent scar on his forehead. I too have a small crescent shaped scar in the same place, the result of a rock thro

Anne-Marie Oomen takes you to a place to be, to be yourself, to be with a world that is endangered, to be where love for what is given us is real and deserved. There is nothing shallow or sappy here; this is the real thing written by the hushed and precise sensibility of a artist/master artisan. Jack Ridl