It seems like I have always loved barns. I love passing by barns on country roads, standing inside of working barns in awe of their beautiful skeletal structures, and being saddened when I see barns in various stages of neglect. My earliest memories of working barns are from when my parents took my sister and me to their friend's the Anderson's dairy farm in New Milford, Ct. That farm along with more land and an adjoining farm later became Hunt Hill Farm which was the home of the late Skitch and Ruth Henderson, as well as "The Silo" cooking school and gallery.

Years ago, my mother gave me Ruth Henderson's book "Season's in the Country" and I was so pleased to see this sketch among the pages. In the center of the sketch is the former home of the Andersons. To the left of the house in what is now the cooking school and gallery are the milking barns that we visited to watch the milking process. Since it was evening, we always had to remember to step over the "meadow muffins" that the cows left on their way from the barn yard into the barn. Another of the barns adjacent to the milking barn held a huge mound of sawdust used as bedding for some of the animals. It was a smaller barn and I remember that the sawdust nearly reached the horizontal timber frames. We used to scale the mound to the beams and jump off of them back in the sawdust. The hay barn is the one at the top left of the photo. I have fond memories of the Anderson's son Carl showing my sister and me how to climb the bales of hay which were stacked like huge stairs to nearly the top of the barn. We couldn't believe how high up we were!

Many years later, Tom gave me this wonderful book and I am still mesmerized by its pages.

I love the fact that I work in a space that Tom converted from a horse barn to a studio. We also would love to someday live in a barn! Take a look at some of my favorite barn homes by clicking on my pinterest page here.