(Today I just received a comment on a post Mostly About Jesus from 2016 and I have to get this all to you because it is so great. I don’t know about the details about how this all came together but it did and maybe we will find out one of these days. Anyway here is the original post and the comment. Felipé)

This morning on FaceBook a local posted a pic of the “Jesus Barn”, a landmark here on the Island. It was beloved, if sort of taken for granted, by everyone. I say taken for granted because I think that we all thought it would last forever but no it collapsed I think in the 90’s. My Rebecca and I remember it in it’s hayday during the 70’s and 80’s. I don’t know the history of it. Maybe it just dropped out of heaven.

But the pic is gorgeous! Hayday shot if I ever saw one. You are looking directly north and the afternoon sun is over your left shoulder. The grass is all dried so it must be late July or later, high summer or better. It speaks of sustained sun and the heat it brings when we locals finally are able to uncurl our bodies locked in position still from the long winter.

Sometime the county came along and imposed it’s will on us and laid a grid down on the landscape and gave it all numbers of streets and avenues. I still don’t know the numbers, refusing to learn. It’s oppressive, like the Romans rolling into ancient Israel. But some of the original names have persisted like, “Bank Road” which is the road the savings bank is on. And there is a pond on Bank Road and the pond’s name is, you guessed it, Bank Road Pond. See, easy peasy.

But what is really interesting is that if a landmark somehow disappears as in the case of the Jesus Barn you still call that spot or even area the “Jesus Barn”. This is why outsider city people tend to look at us funny. Well, there are other reasons too I hear. Anyway, just thought I would bring this to you this Tuesday morn.

Maybe all us old timey Isand carpenters could get some kind of fancy grant to raise it, to reconstruct it again. You know I didn’t even write of the quality of the calligraphy. Someone really busted butt on that. Thank you, whoever you were. And thank you Jesus Barn in totality, teaching us that you are there just like Jesus even though we can’t always see you.

OK, have to go, miss you, love you, Felipé.

”Actually, I created the stencils for the original letters painted high up on the old barn on the Sherman Place in about 1970-71. It seemed a bit weird to me to put that up there, but my hippie husband talked me into it.
My first two children were born in that fine old house, and I also saw many farm animals through their births there. It was good farmland. I raised veggies, miked a couple goats and cows, and had a flock of laying hens. Our little hippie family of 5 moved out in about 1978, to another wonderful family farm east of the North Cascades. Still, Vashon was where I began learning how to live in harmony with the land, and live a lifestyle respectful to this Planet, and so, is a place of significance to me.” Karen C