Editorial June 26, 1989 ISSUE

Home and heart

William E. Moody

One morning I was looking over a couple of items that had just arrived in the mail. I was particularly struck by the contrasts they presented. The first item was an issue of National Geographic magazine, with a pictorial essay of small-town life in America. The sensitive collection of black-and-white photographs helped to give a tangible feeling of what it must have been like to live in rural midwestern communities starting around 1950.

As the essay ranged over a span of the next thirty-five years, there were obviously some changes that took place. Yet all through the photographs, from each decade, you could sense a tranquillity and a kind of homespun happiness. There were the farms, the horses, the one-window post office, the corner store with its soda fountain, the men sitting on a park bench. And there were the families. Kids having a hoedown in the backyard; a husband and wife still shoeing horses out in the barn after sixty years of marriage. From the pictures, it really felt that home is where the heart is.

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