Tag: home

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...

October, Momma, and Memory

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 someone’s front porch makes it all real.

The Beauty of Tolkien’s Quest

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

The Statute of Limitations has Passed

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

Two Literary Journeys

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 us.

Place

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

The Ties that Stretch and Bind

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 bay. Staying abroad and settling into some sort of upwardly mobile immigrant comfort would go against the grain of years of habit.

Castles Built on Sand

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 has to become a ward of the welfare state. It is part of consumer society, not a buffer against it.

Against Pessimism

Alexandria, VA My last post has led some to conclude that I am a pessimist. Even Ross Douthat, among the most perceptive commentators...