When we bought Barn Anew Bed and Breakfast there was one cupola, the original one, on the barn. It is crowned with a weathervane of the angel, Gabriel, blowing his trumpet, which I have always believed is responsible for showering down blessings on the Barn.

This fall, we completed renovation of the bunk house, and in keeping with the cupola tradition, Allan crowned the new building with a cupola of its own. Topped with a weathervane of a goose in flight, it looks right at home with all of the geese using the fly way above our home.

When unseasonably warm temperatures beckoned us to take on outside projects in the dead of winter, Allan became consumed with “cupola fever“. Spending days in the garage, with the south facing doors wide open and a warm winter sun flooding in, Allan was busy designing and building more cupolas. After not seeing much of Allan for about a week, the only clue that I had that he was home was the buzzing of the saw in the garage, I ventured in to see what he was creating. Cupola #3! It was a beauty, long, rectangular and adorned with a spectacular copper arrow weathervane.

 Now it was becoming routine to see our neighbor, Stu, driving down the road in his 4320 John Deere with the hydraulic bucket. Stu pulls the tractor up to the garage, and between the two men, the cupola gets loaded into the bucket. After chaining the cupola securely in place, it is driven to its destination, lifted up in the bucket, heaved onto the roof, placed in position, and securely attached. With minor adjustments, touch ups, and positioning it is a permanent part of the landscape at Barn Anew.

Today cupola #4 was heralded onto the roof of the wood shop in the same tradition. Allan had again been absent for days, and I had only the sound of the saw for company. Then there was the familiar sound of the John Deere coming down the road. The garage doors opened and there was #4! What a beauty, a 4 gabled cube, adorned with a magnificent copper eagle.

Now, there are a total of 4 new cupolas with 4 new brass and copper weathervanes! One would not suspect that each contains a bit of history. Allan has hidden inside of each one, like a message in a bottle, a handwritten note. Just a touch of history and intrigue to make the cupolas even more interesting. Who knows who might find and read those notes, some time down the road. . .

When the phone rang I didn’t expect that by answering it, I would be involved in a final quest.  The call was from Pennsylvania.  The voice on the other end was  a young man.  He asked if we had a couple of rooms available in October.  He said he was planning a trip across the United States as a gift to his father, and I could hear the excitement in his voice. He went on to say that his father loved old barns, and that their trip was to be a quest.   They were mapping out a route that would lead them on their pursuit of old barns.    When they found our website and discovered that they could sleep in a 100 year old barn, they knew that Scotts Bluff Valley had to be one of their stops. 

    It was an October afternoon when Craig and Dave drove into the yard.  Craig was a quiet, shy, young man in his late 20s.  Dave was  robust, out going, jovial.  The two men, for being father and son, were distinctly different personalities, and yet it was easy to see that they shared a strong bond.

     They had traveled from Pennsylvania, just as they had planned, studying and photographing barns along the way.  Their excitement was contagious, as they showed us the pictures in their collection, and each picture had a story to go with it.  There were round stone barns, brick barns, barns with steeples and stained glass, historic barns, new barns.  An incredible collection! For all of the barns that they had seen, it was hard to believe that they were still passionate in their pursuit.  But passionate they were as they asked for a tour of the barn. They seemed to hang on our every word as we told them the history and stories of our barn, while Craig was busy taking pictures of every nook and cranny inside and out. They loved the hayloft where the rail and the big iron hay hook are still in place, and we stood and looked out at the vista of the bluffs.  When we had finished with our barn, they weren’t done yet, and so we made plans to load up in our truck and take a tour of  the old barns in this valley.  Traveling down county roads and back highways we saw a great collection of barns that stand as testaments to the strong farming tradition of Nebraska, and it was fun sharing them with our guests who truly appreciated them.

    When we returned late in the afternoon, Craig said that he was tired and headed up to his room to rest.  As we sat in the sun room with Dave, it was then that we came to understand that this father-son trip was not just a trip about barns.  It was a something much deeper.  Craig was terminally ill with leukemia.  This trip was a last gift to his father.  Dave explained to us that his son had been fighting leukemia since he was a young boy.  He had beaten death several times, something many of his friends, that he had made in his long stays at the hospital, had not been able to do.  With tears in his eyes, Dave told us how proud he was of his son.  He explained how brave Craig had been for the last 15 years fighting the disease, the pain, the losses, the anguish.  He had continued to live life as fully as he could.  He’d been an Eagle Scout, gone to college, gotten a job, was a great artist and musician.  But now he was living with numbered days.  Dave was sharing all of this with us as he wiped tears from his eyes and his voice was choked with emotion.

      He then got up and told us to wait one minute as he went to get something.  When he returned he was holding a book.  He said the book was a gift to us.  Dave had written the book several years ago when Craig was younger.  It had been written as a gift to his son who was having a hard time understanding and dealing with the death of one of his close friends, who also had leukemia.  The book that I was holding in my hands was a gift of love from a father to his son.  It held all of the love that this father had in him to help his son understand and deal with the mystery of death.  He had written a children’s story that had a very mature and difficult theme to it. Now several years later, the book that Dave had written to help his son understand death, was the same book that Dave would truly need to help himself understand what he knew was inevitable for him to deal with, the death of his son. 

   The next morning, after breakfast, we walked out onto the porch with Dave and Craig  as we said our good byes.  The morning was sunny and the two of them were laughing and looking forward to another day’s adventure.  As they drove out of the yard, I was overwhelmed by the strength of father and son.  They both knew what they were facing in the near future, but their quest for barns gave them the courage, and strength to face the final days that they would be able to share together.  The love that those two shared for each other was strong enough to help them find happiness and laughter each day, to give a reason for living, to make life an adventure, and to hold each other close in order to be strong.

    When I went upstairs to clean Craig’s room, there was a tightly folded piece of paper laying on the pillow.  With shaking fingers I picked it up, unfolded it carefully, and read the tiny printed lettering.  “I want to thank you for everything that you did to make our visit so special.  Always remember …everything you do on this fragile planet has value and meaning. Love Craig”

A soft sprinkling of snow on the ground, Christmas carols, sugar cookies in the oven…..hmmm.  Must be getting close to Christmas!  The geese are noisy outside the window, and I realize that I have missed them.  Glad that they are back with their cacaphony of sound.  The frozen branches are vividly black and stark against the white horizon, a good day for being inside and enjoying the holiday season.  The barn has been bustling with Christmas dinners, wine and cheese parties, and groups gathering for a Christmas cup of tea.  Of course, that makes for a festive tradition with tea cups decorated with red ribbon, the Christmas tea pot steaming, pieces of lemon, sugar cubes, honey, and cinammon; and then settle back to read the Christmas Cup of Tea.

With the tourist season in full swing, we have again stocked the shelves of the oak Hoosier with treasures. Our guests like taking a “bit” of Nebraska back home with them. We have our Indian beadwork, chokecherry products, embroidered dish towels, felted trail totes, knit scarves, mittens, and note cards by Russ Finch.

We have a great supply of chokecherry jelly and syrup. Many of our breakfasts feature the chokecherry products. Chokecherries are native to Nebraska, and when we bought the Barn, chokecherry bushes were growing in profusion. So much so that Allan decided to thin some out, and as he was completing this task he found the out house, which had been hidden by the chokecherry bushes and forgotten.

The chokecherries are beautiful small berries that ripen to a deep red, and it is always a race with the birds to see who gets them first. I’d always believed that the name, chokecherry, came from the fact that the dark red berry is very tart. But seeing how they grow wild here, makes me wonder if they got their name because they choke everything else out. Friends and neighbors love to come pick our berries, because they are much larger than most. Probably because they do receive water from our landscaping and perhaps because they date back one hundred years. The chokecherry bush has a beautiful smooth bark, and some of our friends build beautiful garden tables and chairs from this wood. We love our chokecherry bushes and the delicious dark red jelly and syrup that they give. The Baer family from Carpenter, Wyoming makes our jelly and syrup for us, and we love sharing it with our guests.

The hand embroidered flour sack dish towels that are for sale in our store are a labor of love for my mom. She takes great pride in her dish towels and is a perfectionist. The Dutch girls or nursery rhymes are her favorite patterns, and she meticulously chooses the color of each pair of pants to little jackets, as a true artist would. At the foot of her chair a small wicker basket holds her skeins of thread. Now these are a mass of winding, twisting color. Although her stitches are meticulous, the embroidery thread in the basket is a mass of tangled thread, which puts her in a state of dismay. But she can magically pull the right color and right amount from the chaos of thread, snip it off with her tiny scissors, and create one more piece of art. The embroidery hoop that she uses was her mothers. So lets see….that would make it how old? After all, mom herself is 100 years old this July.

It was no April Fool’s joke when we were on our jet ski at Lake Minatare.  The air temperature was 53 degrees and the water temperature was 44 degrees, but we didn’t have a choice.  Our mission was to clock 10 hours on the brand new jet ski in order to get its preliminary check up before we leave for our jet ski adventure up the Sacramento River.

     So donning our Arctic Cat snow mobile gear, motorcycle helmets and life jackets, we began notching off the 10 hours one by one, around and around and around and around the lake.  Now when Allan would rev the machine up to 55 mph and take a quick corner, the difficulty of staying on became a challenge when wearing a nylon snow mobile suit.  Add to that the fact that Arctic Cat snow mobile gloves don’t fit under the hand strap.  But I felt safe knowing that if I did fall in the water, I had my life jacket on and hopefully the motorcycle helmet would float too.  Well, we got 8 hours completed , so now we are ready to head to California.

                                       The Adventure

     Allan and his brother, Pat, will launch their jet skis into the Pacific on April 19, to begin the adventure “From the Sea to the Source- A journey on the Sacramento River.  Their voyage will take them under the Golden Gate Bridge.  They will then navigate San Francisco Bay, San Pablo Bay, and Suisun Bay then into the Delta Region. They will follow the entire length of  the river to Lake Shasta and on to the source of the Sacramento River. The entire length of the water voyage will be approximately 400 miles.  All in all it will be an adventurous trip with high water, currents, sharks, storms, and who knows what else.  Laurie, Pat’s wife, and myself will serve as chase crew, and sometimes passengers. We will report on all of the adventure when we return. 

     In the meantime the Barn will be open and hosted by our good friend, Ron.  Ron is a B&B owner himself, as well as a great chef, so the Barn is in good hands while we are gone.

Sometimes it is not always the best thing to try to get all of the baking done for your guests at day break.  Especially when you start the morning off a little groggy, so that your stout black coffee can’t bring you out of the fog.  But as the saying goes “ Sometimes good things rise out of  the bad.”

This particular March morning, I had planned to serve my rhubarb coffee cake.  I walked out to the garden through the dew washed grass and returned to the kitchen with a pan of crisp, fresh, red rhubarb.  With a quick glance at the clock, I realized I would need to hurry, and hurry I did to get everything ready for the 8:00 breakfast.  Washing, chopping the rhubarb, mixing the batter, adding the spices, I did it.  Just in time the oven door was shut with time to start on the fruit compote.  My cousin, who was visiting also, entered the kitchen full of morning cheer and began helping by cleaning up.

“Do you want me to put this away?” she asked.

“Yes,”  I said. “ Is it the cinnamon?”

“No, it’s the chili powder.”

“What?”

In my morning stupor I had mixed 1T of chili powder with the brown sugar and butter for the crumb topping.

Wide awake now, I pulled the coffee cake from the oven.  Too late, the topping was already bubbling in the rich batter.

“Here, you taste it!”  and we skimmed a sample of the sugary chili powder concoction off.

“Not bad!”  To my complete surprise, it was good.

Our relief turned to hysterical laughter.  Tears were streaming down our faces and the laughter didn’t stop there.  Our guests started coming down stairs, and were caught a little off guard  by the noise coming from the kitchen.  When everyone was seated around the table, we were still laughing, having sworn to each other that the mistake was our secret.

But of course, the secret spilled out and with much laughter it was decided that the new recipe was a great success.  So in my recipe book now 1T of cinnamon has been crossed out and 1T of chili powder replaces it.

Here is the new recipe.  You can try it if you are feeling adventurous, or stick to the old one if you don’t trust me…Either one is delicious!

Brrr…17 degrees outside and it is 3 in the afternoon. I guess that is close to the high for the day. Just yesterday it was warm and sunny. That is February weather in Nebraska. Yesterday we had a Barnful of guests, when a local PEO chapter held their monthly meeting and a brunch here. Egg frittata, fruit compote, muffins, country ham, and orange smoothies was the featured menu. Then guests from Virginia drove in. Little did they know when they made their reservations that the weather would take a sudden turn. But that is when being flexible comes into play. Waking up to an ice encrusted world, they rescheduled their plans, made a few phone calls, and relaxed and layed back to savor a wintery day in the country. And a beautiful day it has turned out to be. Intermitent snow flurries, fog banks shadowing the hills, low clouds rolling past. A slow morning, with pots of hot coffee steaming over a slowly read newspaper. No need to hurry, a whole day to do nothing. By 10:30 the aroma of bread pudding filled the house and brought our guests to the dining room. We lingered at the table with more hot coffee, sweet, steaming bread pudding, and stories to share. They told us about their travels to South America and Alaska, which of course, made us ask questions as their stories tickled our sense of adventure. But even with all of their travels, they were still in awe of our valley; the bluffs, the prairies, and the wide open spaces. So as I watched them pull out of the yard, I reassessed our surroundings, and agreed that this is an awesome setting, nestled here in the shadow of the bluffs.

Shaggy Buffalo hide chaps for the Pony Express Room

On a trip back to Wyoming, we were lucky to find a red, wool, elk-tooth Arapaho dress. We have added it to our Native American collection in the main hallway. On that trip, we also found an Arapaho jingle dress, embellished with 365 jingles that were made from the tin lids of chewing tobacco cans.

Jingle Dress at its new home in the main hallway

While visiting friends at St. Stephens Mission on the Wind River Reservation, we had the opportunity to buy some beautifully hand beaded items that we thought our guests would really appreciate. These items are for sale at the Barn. The proceeds from the beadwork helps support the mission. The authentic beadwork makes them true works of art. There are bracelets, possibles bags, necklaces, mocassins, ear-rings, key chains, and jacket pulls.

Some of our beadwork treasures available for sale

This cold winter weather sure makes you want to curl up and stay warm and snug inside. The Barn is the place to do that on a wintery weekend. You can wake up to steaming bread pudding or savory baked French toast. Just because it’s winter doesn’t mean you have to stay away. Some of our guest’s favorite time to visit is on a blizzardy winter day. They say they love the warmth of the Barn.

Christmas and the holidays have slipped away, and what is left is the quiet, cold days of January. Holiday decoratrion are packed away, and things seem a little plain. But what a wonderful time to make new plans for the new year, and reminise about the past. Also a great time, because there does seem to be more time in January, to set a date to have to share the weekend with nearby friends and family. The barn is warm and cozy on a cold winter’s night. Spend time in the rendezvous room playing games, bridge, or just curl up with a glass of wine and spend a memorable night. Wake up to a delicious breakfast.