January 2011. Although winter presents its challenges to those of us who live with and care for a variety of livestock, the season also brings with it some very special charms indeed; this bank barn is one of them. Each year, after the harvest, this solitary structure emerges from the crops which shielded it from view. I delight in watching how the lights of sunrise and sunset illuminate and reveal its character. I enjoy imagining the animals it may have housed, the feed it may have protected from the elements, and the machinery it perhaps harbored from the snows of winter and the flood waters of spring time. The structure, revealed, speaks of rest and rejuvenation after a long season of hard, productive, work. This rest is important and every bit as much a part of the yearly cycle of events as spring rains and summer sunshine.