| Humans, even nomads, are settlers at heart. We | | | | inside the interior world of her imaginative daydreams |
| want a place to come home to, a hearth to warm | | | | and fantasies. Her parents love her and take good |
| our hands around, and other humans to love us. Marj | | | | care of her, yet in spite of that, she feels the |
| Casswell in "A Place to Come Home To" tells a story | | | | tension present in their marriage and wants to make |
| of these ordinary yearnings and the high price they | | | | it better for them in order to stabilize her world. She |
| exact from us. | | | | carries an adult sense of responsibility that alters her |
| In the opening frame of the novel a 40-year-old | | | | childhood, in spite of her Aunt Elizabeth's efforts to |
| woman returns to her father's house where in her | | | | give her a childhood without cares back to her. |
| girlhood their rich Virginia tobacco farmland stretched | | | | A thread of settling runs through the book--both the |
| in every direction. Time and change have intervened. | | | | positive and negative conations. Merri's ancestors |
| Her mother and the land are gone, but six diaries | | | | come to the land as settlers and set up a lumber mill. |
| from the year she was ten call out to her when she | | | | But, in a kind of fall from Eden, the first settling |
| revisits her old room. The ending frame ripples | | | | occurs: "they had to sell off most of the land with |
| through the years between ten and now, interpreting | | | | trees...because they needed money to live. That's |
| her life through the insights gained in her reflection | | | | when they went to growing tobacco. Everybody |
| the diaries have brought. | | | | around here was [growing] it," her Uncle Lowell (who |
| While the opening and closing frames give us a sense | | | | carries the spirit of the land) explains to her. |
| of context and the passage of time, the guts and | | | | This selling off the resources of the land for cash |
| heart of the book lie in the 38 chapters between | | | | becomes a precursor for the gravel pit contract that |
| these frames, as all revealing photographs do. Each | | | | brings evil things into a young girl's world. Each |
| chapter begins with an excerpt from these diaries | | | | generation has struggled with how to make a living |
| written in the summer of 1956 when everything | | | | off the land. Arguments have sprung up in each |
| changed and the gravel pit came. The diary excerpts | | | | generation. There are those who want to husband |
| serve as epigrammatic themes for what lies ahead in | | | | and steward the land and those who are just |
| each chapter. I read the book twice, and on the | | | | desperate to make a go of it. As a result there's a |
| second reading, I began to title the chapters to keep | | | | slow decline of the land, and a sense of decay and |
| better track of the ebb and flow of the book's | | | | struggle, despite the wish to restore what's been lost |
| action and interludes. | | | | and the honoring of hard times to save a legacy. |
| "A Place to Come Home To" is both a coming of age | | | | The tension in the Coopersmith marriage between |
| story for 10-year-old Meredith (Merri) Coopersmith | | | | Ted and Ellie springs from these differences, as |
| and a losing of an age. On an intimate canvas | | | | husband and wife want different things. Ted, working |
| Casswell paints the sweeping story of the loss of the | | | | a job in town so he can stay on the farm, is sober |
| family farms and the end of an era. No more will | | | | and focused on labor. Ellie, a good mother, but a city |
| there be a time when the small family farm is a viable | | | | girl at heart yearning for music, dancing, flower |
| way of life. | | | | gardens, and good times. She's a city girl transplanted |
| Both within the Coopersmith nuclear family and | | | | to the country, and the transplant didn't take. She's |
| extended family we see how land exerts its pull on | | | | lonely. Ellie finds her husband boring, but has settled |
| some and how the pleasures of the city call others. | | | | down into the marriage, if restlessly, and after a |
| Yearning, hard work, and even strategy cannot save | | | | costly error. In this case she settles for a lack of |
| the farm or even the innocence of the community. | | | | vibrancy in relationship in order to avoid divorce and |
| The gravel pit opens its gaping yaw and swallows up | | | | dies six years later. And Ted settles into his |
| farm land that later will, in turn, be swallowed up by | | | | workshop, a world where there are things he can fix |
| housing developments. | | | | and do something about. |
| Casswell shows the turbulence inside normalcy. As | | | | Casswell writes of subtle shifts through thematic |
| the world around her changes, the rules around her | | | | explorations more than a novel driven by action and |
| change, curtailing her adventures on the farm. But her | | | | plot. This is a quiet, thoughtful and reflective story |
| curiosity cannot be held in check. I feared something | | | | punctuated by lyrical passages of the workings of |
| terrible would happen to Merri in the gravel pits. | | | | nature and a child's delight in the freedom of |
| Instead, we're shown in delicate and realistic detail | | | | exploring the outdoors. |
| the emotional and spiritual development of a young | | | | "A Place to Come Home To" gives us a big story in a |
| girl facing family and community conflict and | | | | small package. Its over-riding theme is that time |
| dissolution of life as previously known. We are let | | | | moves on and we must change with the times. |