As I walk towards the barn, the smell of the hay is amazing to me. There are so many things I can no longer smell. They’ve just vanished, bit by bit from my reality. All of my senses have been dulled. It is almost as if I’ve been retreating from this world.

The path to the barn has no paving. Once, there were two parallel dirt tracks, overgrown with weeds. They were made by the tractors and horse-drawn trailers that used to make their way to the barn. But decades have passed since then. Today, there is only one thin track, a string of dirt meandering gently to capture the smoothest sections of what once was a makeshift road.

I have to concentrate when I walk now, it is no longer so easy to walk. Even with my cane prodding the ground, ensuring that my feet meet solid ground, I know I can still fall at any moment.

Everything has been dulled. I know there are birds, but I cannot hear them. Even if I could, I would not listen. To me, right now, the world consists only of myself and the track I am following.

I am retreating and I know that this may well be the last time I follow it.

I used to walk this path when I was a child. I would run it, as often as not, leaving the smell of my mother’s fried eggs behind as I ran towards my father’s barn. My memory of that smell is stronger than any ‘real’ smell has been in years.

A long time has passed since I was a boy.

At last, I come to the end of the track. The barn door is old and rusted. The barn itself is almost stereotypical. It is a deep red and several stories tall with a gentle rounded shape. It would have been a proud building once. But not anymore. The paint has been darkened by weather. Old windows have been boarded over. It looks derelict and empty. But I know that it isn’t.

I grasp the metal handle of the door and then I pull. I pull with everything I have. My arms ache with the effort. I can’t put much force into it. Nonetheless, slowly, with the screech of rusted metal, the door slides open.

It is dark inside, but it doesn’t take long for my eyes to adjust. I know what to expect.

There is no hay inside. Instead, the space is filled by shapes. Shapes covered with tarps.

My father worked in the barn, but he was no farmer. He’d kicked out the horses and loaded the place up with his equipment. He was a sculptor. When he started a new piece, he’d begin with tiny, simple, models. Slowly, he’d make more and more intricate forms. Then the scale would increase until he had a singular giant wax model. Of course, wax was not the ultimate material. In a careful process, he would create huge plaster forms around the wax and then pour paraffin into those forms. Then, he would delicately shape clay all around the core paraffin model and even within it. Finally, he would pour molten copper into the void between the clay layers. The paraffin would melt away and a bronze statue would be left behind.

It was incredibly delicate work. Delicate and expensive.

The casting itself was an art, to say nothing of the pieces he sculpted.

My father used to tell me, lovingly, that he did his work the same way the ancient Greeks had done it. In a way, he said, his work was timeless.

Few people work that way anymore, at least on that scale. Modern welding techniques and modern materials had made the process simpler. But my father didn’t seek simplicity. His sculptures had an ancient feel to them, a feeling he cultivated. At the same time, his subject matter was thoroughly modern. His most famous piece was of a man sitting in the back of a cab, his eyes pensively watching as an unseen city passes by his window. All the statue had was the corner of his bench seat, a touch of the door and the man himself. And yet everything was evoked. Everyone who saw it was pulled into the reality my father had created.

He was considered a modern master.

When I was a little boy, I used to wonder at the work of his hands. To me, he was the greatest of men and could do no wrong. His barn was a treasure house of all that was perfect in the world.

I didn’t stay a boy. I grew up. And I began to understand more of what he did. I began to understand the expense. I also began to understand the profits. My father made millions. And slowly, his art – in my mind at least – was replaced by the money it made.

I began to think that that was why he did what he did.

When I was in high school, he would drone and on about his technique. He would spend dinner talking, ad nauseam, about how a sculpture – a great sculpture – can reach across time.

Bit by bit, I learned to tune him out. Everything he said just turned to meaningless noise. As I saw it, he was pretentious and he was preachy.

I asked him once, about the money. He brushed me aside, saying the money wasn’t why he did what he did.

“So, why?” I asked him, “Do you charge so much?”

He smiled then and said that, for some people, money was among the most important things. They invested in his pieces, and made them a part of themselves, precisely because they spent huge sums on them.

It seemed like a self-serving argument. Like he too was acknowledging the importance of the money. But he didn’t spend his money. We lived in a small house in a small town. Maybe he felt guilty about what he had? The idea disgusted me.

I started to see my father as a hypocrite. I stopped going to the barn.

I couldn’t understand what my father was doing. With all this money, why didn’t he go and see the world? Why not travel? Why not enjoy the finer luxuries in life? Why were we driving old cars and living in the middle of nowhere, surrounded by country hicks?

Things only got worse from there. He started delivering angry speeches around the dinner table, condemning my short-sightedness. I totally tuned him out.

One time, he told me that if I did not change my ways, I would grow old and die alone – with nothing to pass on or share. I just ignored him. Like the smell of fried eggs, he just began to recede from my reality.

After all, life was too short to spend it worrying about old age.

My mother died when I was 16. Maybe he thought it would change me. I certainly thought it would change him. How could he not travel, now? But nothing changed. Tensions just grew in the house. It turned out she’d been the only one holding us together. I moved out when I was 18, as soon as I could. I went to college at a state school far from our little homestead. And I had nothing more to do with the old man.

He died when I was 23. At least he left me his money.

His will ended with a simple sentence: “I know you will return.”

I knew I wouldn’t.

Unlike my father, I spent his money well. I enjoyed the finer things. I had beautiful girlfriends and cars and houses. I travelled. I enjoyed life thoroughly, exploring and learning and living.

Sometimes I would think of him and his foolishness.

But I knew I had done ‘Life’ better.

I was thirty-eight years old when the cash finally began to run out. I sold a few things. Some cars. A few houses. I started travelling less. And then I remembered the old homestead. That I could sell and not miss in the least.

For the first time in decades, I travelled home.

I drove up the old driveway. The house was in terrible shape. It had been abandoned for twenty years and it showed. It wouldn’t be worth much. I made my way back to the barn. Perhaps some of the equipment would be salvageable. But the barn was locked. I tried to jimmy the lock, but I couldn’t manage it. I called for a locksmith and together we managed to pull open the door to the old building.

As the first light was cast into the vast space, I didn’t understand what I was seeing.

Inside there were shapes, everywhere. They were covered by tarps. I walked into the barn, flashlight in hand. I walked towards the first of the shapes. With a tug, I pulled the tarp back and I revealed a sculpture I’d never seen before. It was a sculpture of a man and a boy.

It was a sculpture of my father and me.

The boy was pointing, excitedly, at something.

And the man was watching the boy, smiling deeply at the scene.

It was a sculpture of my childhood.

In that moment, that image ripped at my heart. That sculpture condemned me. I’d lived a life of luxury, but I didn’t have this. His work would survive, but nothing of mine would.

His sculptures condemned me as his words never had.

I began to walk through the barn, that day, uncovering more and more of the shapes. I didn’t understand them all, not then. But somehow, they seemed to understand me. I felt like a child again, awe-struck by his work. These sculptures were the best my father had ever done, and nobody had ever seen them.

For a moment, I thought of how much they would be worth. I could live the rest of my life off of these works. But I knew, even as I thought it, that I could not sell them. They were never meant to be sold.

I moved into that decrepit house, almost penniless. I took a job at the local grocery and I began fixing up the house. Every day, I made my way down to the barn. Every day I drank in what my father had left behind.

And every day I pictured what he had warned me of; that I would end up here old and broken and alone. Then his work would pass to others and his message to me would be for naught.

I have come back every day since, my heart finally open to what my father had been saying. But there is still so much I do not understand.

Today is no different. Except, of course, I am a much older man. I am old. And I am physically broken.

I am old. But I am not alone.

A little girl dashes past me and into the barn. Her blond hair flies out behind her.

“Grace, slow down, Grace!” I hear her mother call. And I smile. A screaming batch of other kids stream after Grace.

A year after I moved back to my hometown, I met a young widow who had moved to the town from New York. We married, and had two children.

And, now, we have eight grandkids. Including Grace.

Every year, the whole family comes back here, to my own father’s gallery. We drink in what he left for us.

As she enters the barn, Grace skids to a halt. And then she looks up at one of the sculptures. Her excited expression suddenly changes to one of awe.

I know the feeling; I had it when I was her age.

“Grandpa,” she says, looking at me. “What is this one?”

I follow her gaze. I look at the sculpture.

I’ve seen it a million times, but only now do I know what it is.

It is a sculpture of me, an old and stooped man.

And flying by me, pigtails hanging in the wind, is a little girl.

Flying by me, is Grace.