A few years ago, I went back to the farm. I could call it a blast from the past or a weird experience, but it was more the closing of a significant chapter in my experience of bygone generations. It was long after my grandparents passed away (the last being in 1988) and my father’s passing (1989). The property, two 40-acre parcels, had long been sold off to a neighbor, the furnishings distributed to various new homes through a farm sale and heirlooms divvied up among grandchildren.

While my wife and I had spent some time after my mother’s death (1995) in Ely, Minnesota, from where my people hail, that time was all about closing the door on an intervening chapter of our family history as we looked after my parent’s modest estate. But coming back this last time, years later, a weird feeling descended on me driving down the old farm road. Gone was the sign on the farm road gate, bearing the name of my grandfather, Jack Gianotti, Sr., inscribed in thick, faded red letters on a weather-worn barnboard. The old padlock was gone, and the gate was nowhere to be seen.

The barn still stood solid and proud as we drove down the farm road across the front 40. But the farmhouse where I had spent many summers during my annual dream vacation visits as a child was gone. The new owners had built a house, lacking the character of the pole construction of the weather-beaten, clapboard house that was home to Grams and Grampa for decades.

Pulling into the front yard, the residual cloud of dust from the long drive on the gravel-dirt road settled slowly, sparking memories of many trips of years gone by. No one answered the front door, but after hearing some noise from behind the barn, I sauntered over, savoring the sights and smells.

A man in his early 40s was building an addition to the barn. I introduced myself as one of the grandsons of Jack and Gustava Gianotti, the previous owners. Stopping his work, he shook my hand. He had never met my grandparents but had heard good things about them. I thought to myself that he didn’t know half of how great they were—they were my heroes, larger than life to me. But I held back my hagiography, and we settled into a great discussion. I filled him in on the property’s history, and he took an interest in the story of Gramps at one time raising mink (during the craze back in the day for mink stoles popular with the ladies). He had always wondered about the hundreds of small animal skulls he found behind the other side of the barn. He went on to talk about all kinds of interesting things he found there. I explained that it was the farm garbage pit. And it wasn’t far from the two-seater outhouse, which was now well-foliated with bushes and small trees. It was an interesting history lesson for him, but I was enlivened to regale him with more stories.

As we walked through the barn, most of the contents were new things, but on a back wall, there it was—I immediately recognized it. The sign from the front gate. He said he saved it but wasn’t sure why, but now he wanted me to have it. I gladly accepted and still have it to this day in my workshop.

How can I explain my feelings about the farm as I drove away? And that I still have to this day. On one level, it represents more than a century of family history that is now gone. My children have no memories of it except a four-generation photo of my grandfather, father, me and my son posing in front of the farmhouse. My grandmother’s parents settled on the property, which became the family homestead for about 100 years. Ely was where my people lived, came from, and always returned to. And now the land and barn were passed on to someone else. There is nothing there for me anymore.

My feelings included a sense of loneliness. I wished my dad had not sold the farm during the year between Grandpa’s death and his own. It was sold for cheap; I could have scrounged up the money somehow, and I could have maintained the tie to the land and kept the legacy of my great-grandfather, who immigrated from Italy in the mid-to-late 1800s. He came to start a new life and a family with dreams and hopes for something better. All my dad’s relatives (and, by extension, my relatives) are no longer there (or if they are, they are distant cousins).

As I drove out the farm road, I also felt disconnected from those that had gone before me; there was no one alive now in my upline of the ancestral family tree, and I was no longer rooted in a parcel of land on this earth. True, they had all died years earlier, but I knew this would be the last time I would be back to see the farm and probably the last time I would set foot in Ely. Now, all I have is pictures and memories.

This series of stories called “from the farm” is my effort to keep this one sliver of history alive for a few more generations. Of course, I am interested in this, with no claims to be an objective historian. The life that my great-grandfather, Giovani Gianotti, began when he got off the boat as an immigrant from Italy continues with its various branches. The one I am most familiar with, of course, is my particular line in the family tree. But in writing my ancestors’ and my own stories, I pray that others will appreciate the significance of their own stories and tell them to their children and grandchildren.

The most important story I have already told in this series of articles is the one I experienced in 1972. While my grandfather’s name written in red letters on a worn piece of barnboard commemorates that great man in my eyes, my name was written down in heaven in what the Bible calls the Book of Life. And so is everyone who has come to faith in Jesus Christ and His death on the cross to give us new life. Our inheritance is not in physical, earthly possessions nor a land handed down from generation to generation, but as the apostle Peter in the Bible wrote:

Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who according to His great mercy has caused us to be born again to a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead, to obtain an inheritance which is imperishable and undefiled and will not fade away, reserved in heaven for you. (1 Peter 1:3-4)