This is my old shed.

It’s across the road from our old farmhouse and just south of our old barn. I keep gardening stuff in it, mostly, and perhaps a little junk. Stuff I trip over. Empty fuel cans, a compressor that doesn’t work, some old tools I sometimes wish I could find. It’s only ten feet from the tar road and each winter the windows and the big sliding door get plowed in by guys I wave to if I’m outside. Right up over the eaves one winter. Had to slide down through a hole in the banking to get in. Like being inside a pillow.

There’s one bulb in the shed with a dangling string that you yank on. My dad helped me run the wiring back in nineteen hundred and ninety-nine from over to the barn. We crawled around and underneath a bunch of ancient broken things to finish the job. Threading things down through drilled holes, shouting up through floorboards. We used to keep chickens and rabbits in the shed, that’s why dad and I strung the light, but not any more. Too much trouble.

I found some old copies of the Portland Press Herald from World War One while rummaging around in the bowels of the shed once, looking for something that I can’t recall; but I’ve misplaced them. Pictures of black ships at sea with black holes in the sides of them. White froth and wrack streaking the black waves. Despair in hundred-point headlines.

The shed’s a little twisted, saggy, bent. It’s old and a spring-runoff brook trickles beneath the northwest corner so it settles a bit more each April. Don’t we all. The flowers are beautiful in the summer, but not now.

A grey sky was spilling a wet snow a few minutes ago and I went outside just to look up at it falling down. If not for the sudden clarity of the shed I would have hurried back inside because of the cold. Raw cold. Finger-blowing cold. But it turned out I ached with the need for the clarity of cold. For this or that. Black or white. So sick of grey. Of not knowing.

I walked across the road to the barn and back again to check on something. The snow spitting, now mixing with a hanging rain. Just walked without looking. No one’s out on the roads these days anyway. Watched my shed again, admiring its crisp angles and palpable starkness; unambiguous even while leaning slightly north. Steadfast, if that can be applied to a shed. White snow and rain streaking the black window voids.

I made a photograph about my shed just then, to catch a moment of certainty. Knock down the despair, perhaps. Steady my nerves and resolve. For now. 

I’ve had interaction with exactly eight people in the last nineteen days because of the virus. That’s probably seven people too many. But I couldn’t do this alone. Couldn’t stand to go through this without my wife. Beloved Karen. 

She’s been nudging me for twenty-one years to repair those busted windows, but I didn’t do it. The sashes never did fit properly, but the panes must have once held glass to keep the blowing snow out. Just tacked on quickly from the inside a long time ago by someone I never met. Someone who’d never heard of the virus. These old sashes are just temporary, he thought. But everything is. I hope I get to fix them someday. Hope is wonderful.

For a larger version, go to Flickr.

Meta: Pentax K-3, 200mm f/2.8 lens at f/7.1, ISO 100, 1/8th second