I took this photo of Daddy’s barn one foggy spring morning as I peered through branches of a granddaddy graybeard. The old barn might not look like much, but it means a lot to me. Daddy passed away in 2006. So in a sense, it’s what I have left of him.

You wouldn’t believe what’s inside. Tools? Yes. Lots of them. But that’s not the half of it. Like others who lived through the Great Depression, Daddy never threw out a thing.

His grandsons opened the barn door one day, a few months after his passing, to sort the barn’s contents and perhaps find something they could use. Before setting foot inside, they had to move several items off the floor in the doorway.

Inside, the barn has an overhead light, but it’s never needed. Plenty of light enters through the “picture” window on the barn’s backside, a window salvaged from the house my parents built in the 1950s, the “new” house, we called it back then. (My parents switched it out with thermal windows in the 90s when they installed central air.)

At the end of the sorting process in Daddy’s barn, which took several days, each grandson took a number of tools. You’d never know it, though. For every screwdriver they took, there are still at least five more. Granted, most are worn and rusty, but they still work, in a pinch.

The barn is mine now — couldn’t part with it. What’s inside today, besides the tools I mentioned, nine years after Daddy’s death? Well, let’s see . . . several vices, a medicine cabinet and half-dozen multi-paned windows from the “new” house, which Daddy stored there, and the items I’ve added: two solid wood doors, a commode, four pegboard panels, a glass-topped patio table with four matching chairs, and one straight-backed chair with a cowhide seat so brittle it now crumbles.

Like father like daughter.