Farewell to My Private Cathedral

by

Special to United Methodist Insight | Jan. 21, 2025

Tears came to me eyes as I stepped into the barn for the last time. I could still see the pig pens on either side of the driveway, though they had been torn out years ago after Dad was gone. The memory of fat bellied sows watching over their litters of wiggling pink piglets under low hanging heat lamps played out in my mind’s eye like a YouTube video.

And I could see the big boar’s pen on the left side, across from the old chicken enclosure next to the barnyard door. That 800-pound porcine stud was Dad’s pride and joy, only a notch or two below his beloved grandkids, the equivalent of E.B. White’s “Some Pig” in “Charlotte’s Web.”

Dad loved his pigs. He had milked cows most of his life, but when he sold the Holsteins and most of his two farms in 1974, he went into the feeder pig business on the remaining 25 acres. Pigs were Dad’s joy, something I, as a lover of cows, never fully understood. Except for breakfast bacon and honey-baked ham at Christmas, I could easily get along without pigs.

My wife Jo and I were there to say farewell to the place that had been our weekend retreat for 17 years and then our full time home for a few years after retirement. The estate of my late cousin, Jim Sumwalt, invited us to collect several items of family memorabilia we had left there when we sold the farm to Jim and his wife Marge in 2017.

Dad bought this as a second farm, up the road from our main farm, in the early '60s. The house was rented out until Dad and Mom moved up there after Dad stopped milking cows. They built on a garage and utility room, remodeled the kitchen, enclosed the porch, lowered the ceilings, put wood paneling over the cracking plaster, covered the wood floors with some of that the ubiquitous 70s-era gold carpeting and added bathrooms. The two-seater outhouse became a garden shed.  

Leonard and Bernice Sumwalt were proud of their retirement home, and I was proud of them. After years of hard work and living with the mountains of debt so familiar to farmers everywhere, they retired debt-free to a comfortable home surrounded by unlimited garden space. Dad built an air-conditioned storage room under the front porch and raised acres of tomatoes, sweet corn, green beans, pumpkins, carrots and flowers which they sold at the farmers' market in front of the courthouse in Richland Center. People still talk about their sweet corn and tomatoes.

We bought the farm in 1997, when Dad’s Parkinson’s forced his move to Pine Valley Manor and Mom’s to Richland Hills apartments in town. We did a thorough renovation with the help of our contractor and home design specialist, Daniel Miller, who now owns Ocooch Books and Libations on Main Street in Richland Center, Wisconsin. 

The wood paneling and gold carpeting came out, the ceilings were returned to their nine-foot glory, all the downstairs interior walls were knocked down and a large brick chimney in the center of the house was removed. We also added a new entryway, energy-efficient windows, a new utility room, a study for all my books, a kitchen that was open to the whole downstairs, patio doors that open out to the deck, two new bathrooms, a maple wood floor and a fireplace with a wood stove insert.

The first time Mom returned to see what we had done to her house, she said to my sister Ruth, “I don’t know why they had to do all that; it was just fine the way it was.”

The house was mostly finished when we hosted 160 people in the backyard for our 30th wedding anniversary in 2005. People came up from the church we were serving in Wauwatosa, Wisconsin, along with relatives, friends and longtime farm neighbors. A new steel roof and siding were added later, and the barn and outbuildings were painted a bright farm red.

We loved living there when we retired in 2014. My Lyme disease made it necessary to sell just after Mom passed in 2017. It broke our hearts to say good-bye to our dream house and the land where I grew up.

The kind realtor who opened the house for us that day permitted me to take one last look in the barn. On a shelf, over where one of the hog pens used to be, I found a pair of homemade wooden skis which my grandfather, Archie Sumwalt, made for his seven children in the 1930s. They will be passed on to my late brother Alan’s son, Andrew, who inherited Grandpa’s carpenter genes.

I climbed up into the haymow, as I had done a thousand times before, with some difficulty now with my 73-year-old creaking bones. So many memories came flooding back. I could see the hay bales coming up the elevator and smell the aroma of hay fresh from the field, as farm boys, sweating in the summer heat, labored to stack them all the way to the roof. My brothers, Alan and Bob, our sister Ruth, and the neighbor kids, Randy and Sandy Moe, used to make long tunnels through the bales and swing from a rope attached to one of the hand-carved wooden beams.

I looked up for the last time at the light streaming through the cracks in the barn boards. The haymow had always been my private cathedral. Breathing a prayer of thanksgiving for the good life we had known there, I climbed down, picked up Grandpa’s skis, and walked to the car, where Jo was waiting to go with me back to our life in the city.

The Rev. John Sumwalt is a retired clergy member of the Wisconsin Annual Conference of The United Methodist Church and the author of “How to Preach the Miracles.”