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Home, Revisited
The pandemic has provided an opportunity to recenter our lives around home and family
More than a Step on the Boss Man’s Ladder
If Dolly Parton left the Smoky Mountains, it seems to have been on a hero’s journey that Joseph Campbell would have recognized. She came back, bearing gifts.
I Hear Kentucky Singing
Whatever our color or life or place of origin, we can all sing of our longing for home, our love of the natural world, our delight in children, and our…
Pilgrims Longing for Home
As someone who appreciates the value of place, rootedness, and limitations on my horizon of vision, I’m afflicted with deep sense of unease as to the nature of my own…
Good Night, Sweet Babe Magnet
It's as if two men are talking fondly about a woman both of them were once married to.
And Then Came the Chickens, Part Two: A Dispatch from Dumb-Ass Acres
“Bawk-bawk be-gehk!” she cries, and I know just where she’s coming from.
And Then Came The Chickens—After the Bobcat: A Dispatch
Heaven favored me with three successive clement weekends.
A Place Called Home – Even When You’re Young
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…
Two Last Suppers and Ordinary Greatness: A Double Eulogy
What are the compensations on the downhill side of life?
A Space for Children in the Home
“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.”…
The Land of Storybooks
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…
Oneself as Another in the Controlled Burn: A Dispatch
Low flames and smoke and visions of the eschaton.
A Little Home Cooking
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…
Something’s Fishy–But Not Very–At Dinnertime
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…
A Man’s Home Is His Castle
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…
Longing for Home Over Glory: An Artful Interpretation of the Epic Poems by Homer and Virgil
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…
The Night of Susurrant Voices
God didn't put twelve months on the calendar so we could work them all.
On Being a Worthy Heir of the Agrarian Contrarians
But, as Shakespeare wrote, we sometimes “by indirections find directions out.”
What’s Wrong With Iowa? (A Transplanted Professor Knows)
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.
Homesick Nation
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…
