Tears welled up as I stepped into the barn for the final time, the echoes of a life long past swirling around me. The pig pens that once lined the driveway were gone—torn out years ago after Dad passed—but I could still see them in my mind’s eye. Fat belted sows watched over their litters of pink piglets, wiggling under heat lamps, a scene as vivid as a YouTube video. On the left, the big boar’s pen stood proud, Dad’s 800-pound “Some Pig”—straight out of Charlotte’s Web—only outshone by his love for his grandkids. Dad adored his pigs, a passion I never quite shared as a cow lover. Sure, I savored bacon at breakfast and ham at Christmas, but pigs were his world, not mine.

My wife Jo and I were there to bid farewell to the family farm, a place that had been our weekend sanctuary for 17 years and our full-time home after retiring in 2014. We’d sold it in 2017 to my cousin Jim Sumwalt and his wife Marge, but Jim’s estate invited us back to retrieve some cherished family memorabilia. This farm, in Richland County, Wisconsin, at the intersection of County D and St HWY 58, was Dad’s second property, bought in the early ‘60s. He and Mom moved in after he sold the Holsteins and most of his land in 1974, diving into the feeder pig business on the remaining 25 acres. They transformed the house—adding a garage, utility room, and bathrooms, enclosing the porch, and covering the wood floors with that classic ‘70s gold carpeting. The two-seater outhouse? Repurposed into a garden shed.

Leonard and Bernice Sumwalt were proud of their retirement haven, and I was proud of them. After decades of farming’s relentless grind and crushing debt, they retired debt-free, surrounded by sprawling gardens. Dad built an air-conditioned storage room under the porch and grew acres of tomatoes, sweet corn, green beans, pumpkins, carrots, and flowers, which they sold at the Richland Center farmer’s market. Locals still rave about their sweet corn and tomatoes—I can almost taste them, sun-warmed and bursting with flavor.

We took over in 1997 when Dad’s Parkinson’s forced him into Pine Valley Manor and Mom to Richland Hills apartments. With help from contractor Daniel Miller (now owner of Ocooch Books and Libations on Main Street in Richland Center), we gave the house a full overhaul. Out went the gold carpeting and wood paneling; up went the ceilings to their nine-foot glory. We knocked down interior walls, removed a central brick chimney, and added energy-efficient windows, a new entryway, a study for my books, an open kitchen, patio doors to a deck, two new bathrooms, maple wood floors, and a fireplace with a wood stove insert. Later, a steel roof and bright red siding brought the barn and outbuildings to life. Mom, seeing the changes, quipped to my sister Ruth, “I don’t know why they had to do all that; it was just fine the way it was.” But in 2005, we hosted 160 guests for our 30th anniversary in the backyard—church friends from Wauwatosa, relatives, and farm neighbors—proof the house was ready to shine.

We loved retiring there in 2014, but my Lyme disease forced us to sell in 2017, just after Mom passed. Leaving broke our hearts—this was our dream home, the land where I grew up. That final day, the kind realtor let me linger in the barn. On a shelf where a hog pen once stood, I found wooden skis my grandfather, Archie Sumwalt, carved for his seven kids in the 1930s. They’ll go to my nephew Andrew, who inherited Grandpa’s carpentry knack. I climbed the haymow one last time, my 73-year-old joints protesting. Memories flooded back—the smell of fresh hay, bales stacking to the roof, my siblings Alan, Bob, Ruth, and neighbors Randy and Sandy Moe tunneling through them, swinging from a rope on hand-carved beams. Light streamed through the barn boards, my private cathedral, where I whispered a prayer of gratitude for the life we’d lived there.

I climbed down, skis in hand, and joined Jo in the car, ready to return to city life. Shared by John Sumwalt, a retired pastor and old Wisconsin farm kid, this isn’t just a goodbye—it’s a love letter to a family farm that shaped us, a legacy of hard work, love, and memories that will never fade.