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Since posting "A Place Called Home" we have learned of the passing of Otto Warmbier. Just as home is the place where absence is felt most durably, so home is…

What are the compensations on the downhill side of life?

“If children do not have space to release a tremendous amount of energy when they need to, they will drive themselves and everybody else in the family up the wall.”…

Earth's the right place for love.

At evening when the lamp is lit, Around the fire my parents sit; They sit at home and talk and sing, And do not play at anything. Now, with my…

Low flames and smoke and visions of the eschaton.

Richmond, VA I do not think it outrageous, every now and then, to despair for the future of cooking in this country. Not all the time, no, for there are…

Ingham County, MI As darkness falls upon what a friend of mine charitably calls “Jack-Ass Acres,” and as the promise of rain comes with the moving clouds at the end…

Situate the preference where it is, not where it isn’t.

Hidden Springs Lane. After too long, I finally got around to watching The Castle (1997), a film recommended by FPR’s Jeff Polet. It’s a film you probably haven’t heard of…

This is what we all need now: a deep belly-laugh.

Dramatic paths to glory are viewed with skepticism in our modern democratic age. As Tocqueville suggests, “amongst democratic nations ambition is ardent and continual, but its aim is not habitually…

God didn't put twelve months on the calendar so we could work them all.

He was looking at me with what appeared to be some degree of disbelief.

But, as Shakespeare wrote, we sometimes “by indirections find directions out.”

If you think you may legitimately enjoy the physical benefits of a place while dwelling in the airy regions of judgment above it, you’d better think again.

In 1852, the first piano arrived in Stockton, California. Imported from Cincinnati, it was a gift to Mary Kroh from her father, a minister who had traveled west to preach…

It is a reminder that our own personal winter is coming. When you are daily reminded of your own bones by pains in your joints, seeing a skeleton dangling from…

Tolkien understands the deepest of our longings and makes us understand them better than before.

They never quite got it when they asked me if I was “going home for Christmas” and I replied, “I live at home.”

We have, until this day, indulged in our individualistic reveries, imagining that we are always free to “light out for the Territory” and leave the ills of communal life behind…

Will I die here? I don't know. I have tried living away from here and it does not work.

Many a time, I have seen my friend doting on his little seven-year-old half brother, picking him up from school, cooking for him, and keeping his classmates’ junk food at…

Even for the average homeowner, ownership all too often is imagined as a way of gaming income flow and consumption over a lifetime, accumulating enough to spend down before one…