Why Barns are Painted Red

One of the best places for family talk is while you are driving. For many of us, the automobile trip has provided a convenient forum for long and sometimes intelligent discussions.

Unfortunately, modern electronics is encroaching on this last frontier where intelligent communication between family members still occurs.

Sure kids were removed from the ability to participate when they took their comic books on trips . But at night, the comic books were put away and intelligent discussion between the generations began again. When the kids were reading, mom and dad talked, and the little "antenna ears" might pick up on the choicest morsels of conversation. (The kids do hear you know even if they pretend that they do not.)

Then, of course, there was the radio-but it got boring after awhile. FM was added to AM making it more useful. Later there were tape players, CD's, small TV's and now even Satellite Radio. Now we even have GPS systems, which I will blog about another time.

Slowly modern technology has dumbed us down and conversation is slowly being crowded out of the vehicle.

However some of still talk while we are driving. It is a good time to talk. Most of the time we are not interrupted unless it is by the cell phone. (Whoops we lost the conversation between the family members again thanks to the ubiquitous cell phone). If HarleyDad tries to end a conversation by walking out of the room, he falls out of the car.

But what does all this have to do with red barns?

Well the topic of conversation yesterday in the car was "Why are barns painted red? " We must have seen a red barn and that sight caused the conversation to be initiated.

Brokerbelle thinks that barns have been painted red for years because of snow storms. Farmers had to take care of their livestock even in snow storms. In fact some would go out in blizzards and become lost and even die by getting lost in heavy snows. Shucks, Pa missed the barn again, I wonder if we will ever find him. So some people began to paint their barns red so that they could find them even in snow storms. These were in the days before electric lights, flashlights and automobiles.

Brokerbelle further claims that sometimes farmers ran a rope from the barn to the house in order to help guide them to the barn when it was dark or when the weather was bad so that they could take care of the animals.

So that is why barns are red.

Now if I had kept the CD player going I could have heard Alabama for the forty fifth time-but luckily it was not running and intelligent conversation invaded our mobile domain. The family talked and had a real live discussion. We had a front room on wheels kind of conversation. And it was good.

Perhaps we deal with our values like red barns. There is some likelihood that in the storms of life that we will wander away and get lost. So we overstate our values. We paint them red. We run ropes to them - ropes in our churches, schools, politics and home. We overstate the case. And why? Because we do not want to loose the way and be destroyed.

Harleys are great. But not for living room conversation between family members. If that is what you are looking for (and it is a good thing!), then take the car.

HarleyDad