Home

Book excerpt: Home is the story of growing and growing up in a place where human beings made a hard land home, a place of profound trust and security, space, and responsibility. It celebrates family, the family of father and mother, the extended family of uncles and aunts and grandparents, the larger family of community, molded by the land and weather and time, yet never reduced by necessity into confusing making a living with making a life. Home is about living in an agrarian world of the 30's and 40's, with all the usual uncertainties connected with crops and animal husbandry, and all the certainties of decent persons sharing a common endeavor, living close to the land and animals and each other. The story is related quietly, respectfully, with no pretense of romantic or narrative embellishment. A common denominator is hard, physical labor handled with the competence and grace of necessity and opportunity rather than the demands of hardship--handled so well that good times and leisure seem part of a seamless whole, no one, nothing, left out, all things part of the scheme, so that no other environment ever seems so complete and secure, no other place so reliable as to be called home.