On home

Maggie says:
After finishing two novels I didn't like, I've been craving a good, GOOD read that I could just lose myself in. Last night I decided it was high time to finish reading All the King's Men, which due to a work sidetrack I only got about ten pages into last spring before it started gathering dust.

So there I am, enjoying the crisp fall night under lots of blankets, and page 15 feels like a shock to my senses. Home. HOME. In the fall, at that. This one hit me so hard, right where it hurts, that I almost couldn't read anymore. But of course, it made me read even faster. Even though it's my favorite time of the year in New Mexico and the smell of roasting green chile will now haunt me forever, there's no place like home. The air, the green, the faces, the voices, the warmth, the kindness, the ease. North Carolina through and through.

So to my family (that's my late Grandpa Max on the family farm in the photo), and to Marjorie (who's heading to her home for the annual Yamboree next weekend), this one's for you:

"No," he said, and it was another voice, quiet and easy and coming slow and from a distance, "I'm not here to ask for anything today. I'm taking the day off, and I've come home. A man goes away from his home and it is in him to do it. He lies in strange beds in the dark, and the wind is different in the trees. He walks in the street and there are the faces in front of his eyes, but there are no names for the faces. The voices he hears are not the voices he carried away in his ears a long time back when he went away. The voices he hears are loud. They are so loud he does not hear for a long time at a stretch those voices he carried away in his ears. But there comes a minute when it is quiet and he can hear those voices he carried away in his ears a long time back. They say: come back, boy. So he comes back."