Faye Barr, an avid card player, loved being around others and at her daughter’s flower farm

Faye Barr loved her home at New Aldaya Lifescapes in Cedar Falls.

She and her roommate “were like two peas in a pod,” said her daughter Robin Darland. They were always ready for a social engagement at the nursing facility. 

“These two looked good,” she said. “They had their makeup done every day, their hair and nails.

“All the staff there really liked my mom,” Darland added. Her room was a place aides and nurses enjoyed visiting.

Faye died May 28 at MercyOne Waterloo Medical Center after fighting COVID-19 for 24 days. She was 79.

Darland described her mother as an “encourager” and an avid player of cards – usually euchre or rummy. She noted people always enjoyed being around her. That’s how she has felt about her, too, since childhood.

“When I was growing up, she had a record player,” Darland recalled. “She loved to play Elvis Presley.”

Faye was a young mother, marrying Rodney Barnes when she was 18. They settled in Cresco and had three children by the time she was 21.

“She was playful whether we were canning tomatoes or gardening, or whatever we were doing,” said Darland. She recalls her mother leading the children in activities like picking hickory nuts, hunting in the woods for morel mushrooms and foraging in the ditches for strawberries. “She made it fun, but she ran a pretty tight ship, too.”

Faye was a produce manager at a grocery store in town, later working at a cheese factory in Schley and a manufacturing facility in Decorah before retiring. She brought a work ethic to her jobs developed while growing up as one of 10 children on her parents’ farm near Ionia. 

“My mom worked really hard on the farm,” said Darland, noting she left school in the eighth grade after struggling with dyslexia. “And then she helped at home with her brothers and sisters. … She was a person that overcame obstacles.”

After a divorce from her first husband, Faye married Dennis Barr in 1984. He died in 2010.

“I moved her down here (to Cedar Falls) six years ago because I wanted her to be closer to me. She had fallen and broken her shoulder,” said Darland, who works at the University of Northern Iowa’s Rod Library and lives on an acreage west of Cedar Falls.

The property, known as Morning Glory Farm, includes a barn and other out buildings. Darland grows flowers that, until recent years, she sold at area farmer’s markets.

Faye spent time at the rural homestead on Sundays after church and during many family gatherings.

“She wasn’t one of those people who are just in the nursing home waiting to die. It wasn’t like that,” said Darland.

“I visited my mom every single Sunday – went to church with her, worshiped at New Aldaya,” she said. After services in the chapel, the pair would head to the facility’s greenhouse. 

“We’d talk, I’d water the plants,” said Darland. “So, I volunteered there every Sunday. Mom liked it that I did that, too.”

And she appreciated that her daughter also had a tie to the land with the farmstead.

“Mom was really proud of me being here out on the farm,” said Darland. “I was kind of a farmer.”

Faye celebrated her birthday there March 3 before COVID-19 precautions and, later, the illness kept her isolated.

Darland keeps coming back to family gatherings like those as she remembers her mother. The dishes would get cleared away after the meal and Faye would begin asking when the card game was going to start.

“My favorite memories are just of her being in her glory out here with everyone and playing cards,” she said. “It was almost always euchre.”