"Each of us has a true personal landscape, but some people never find it. I was lucky to find mine when I was a child, & never to lose it," says one author. Riveting, poignant, funny, the essays gathered here in Thoughts of Home all speak of the dreams, the memories - & the sometimes-painful realities - of the personal landscapes we call home. For some, home is defined be a passion for a place. On "The Trying-to-Leave-New-Orleans Blues" a young woman makes three vain attempts to "achieve escape velocity" from "the powerful force field" of New Orleans, where at lunchtime she will "walk down to the Napoleon House bar & cafe, one of the most wistfully beautiful interiors in America...The waiters are languid, understanding men in white button-down shirts with old-fashioned ribbed shirts shoeing through." For others home is the house where they grew up. In the mysterious "A Haunted Place" a daughter & son decide not to sell the family home after they hear the footsteps of their dead father on the stairs. In "The Time-Travel Game" a grown woman still returns to a Manhattan park bench in front of her childhood apartment when she needs to "reconfirm the past." & as "The Grandmother Who Could do Anything" makes clear, home is also about people we love. For this author it was a sturdy, down-to-earth woman who could both coolly chop the heads off live chickens & warmly open her arms to her granddaughter. "With Grandma holding me, my face against the bib of her apron, I felt invincible, as if nothing could ever hurt me." In "Mother's Gifts," an army brat who moved twelve times in her childhood honors her mother's ability to make a home no matter how dispiriting the circumstances. Her weapons were heirlooms, family rituals, & curtains. "By my mother's standards...we were not at home until every window was properly dressed. Even the wilder reaches of the natural world can become a home to those looking for a sense of quiet continuity. In "Almost Like Hibernation" a couple decides to live in a log cabin in the remote Yaak Valley in northwestern Montana, where the big excitement is watching otters play on the ice, or simply waiting for the mail. "We used to live in cities, where we felt clumsy, rushed, prone to mistakes...Now, finally, I think we have founds our level, somewhere way down near the bottom of things." The essays in Thought of Home provide vivid glimpses into other people's lives, but these stories - no matter how different from our own - always strikes a cord of recognition. Each somehow makes us appreciate our personal histories.

Mindful Thoughts at Home will show you that your home is not only a place, it's a feeling we can all create, instil, and nurture wherever we live or whoever we share our space with.

These thoughts are published for the same reason that led the author from time to time to put them upon paper,—a wish to meet a want in the sphere of the affections rather than to claim any honor in the kingdom of ideas. Wherever important questions have been at issue he has not avoided them, however conspicuous or controverted; but the volume aims to breathe a kindly spirit above the reach of sect and party. He is not ashamed to have his style show something of the habit of his profession, and to use, in part, ideas that he has expressed in the lyceum and the pulpit in a different form. It will be seen that the several subjects connect themselves more or less closely with a year’s life in the household, and that the light which cheers the whole twelvemonth is kindled on the hearth-stone at Christmas and New Year.