​Mary Fahl sang the beautiful song, “Going Home,” for the movie Gods and Generals. Such lyrics and tune that reached into my Southern psyche as to remind me of what the fight was all about.

I often treat books in a way I treat old, favorite, movies (picture shows) that I watch over and over, over the years, I reread them. I have read Gone with the Wind twice, None Shall Look Back twice and Absalom, Absalom three times (for this one it was because I am slow and it took me three times to understand it: once in high school, once in college and once twenty years later). I have read (though when I was much younger) The Yearling and Tom Sawyer each, at least, three times, though I read Huckleberry Finn but once--didn’t care for it.

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I have also read The Catcher in the Rye twice. I read it when I was in my teens, about the age of Holden Caufield, the protagonist, and though I found it humorous at the time I, moreover, pitied him for the New York home he seemed to have either never had, or had lost. Prep school was not home schooling.

All of this is to make a point: A contemporary author whose books I have read more than once, Dr. James Everett Kibler, writes keenly on home and the rich meaning of it. My only regret is he has not written more of them.


I love the topic, the settings, the characters and the stories. Dr. Kibler’s books are (in my opinion) poetic treatments of prose, all such that anyone who loves his own home understands that home is a place of seclusion and contentment. Even in homes, which probably includes all of them, where there is, or has been, from time to time boisterousness or anger and perhaps even regret and shame there usually is a grace that generates peace and love through family. It is a place to fight, and even die, for. Concrete and speeding cars and fast (fat) food restaurants are not a place of home nativity. The personification of the interstate highway system is a psychotic domestic executioner.

In one of Dr. Kibler’s novels, Walking Toward Home, one line which I have quoted elsewhere as it is a favorite of mine, a character by the name of Kildee says: “Guess the best thing dirt roads do…is they slow people down. The world’s too much in a hurry, and usually with no place to go. Everything flies by in a blur. And people get to where they don’t belong anywhere and ain’t from no place at all.”


Dirt roads take you home. Interstate highways take you to traffic jams.


Interstate highways take away land which were places for homes once, and fields of cotton and corn. Now fields grow corn for ethanol for cars so more freeways will be needed to take away more fields for corn. . . what?


It has often been acknowledged that the North was (and still is) the navigation society, the South the (and still is) agrarian society. From Memory’s Keep alluding to what Triggerfoot would have thought, had he been aware of Thomas a’kempis’ words: “‘Those who travel seldom come home holy.’” Holden Caufield did not, nor did Yankee commercial ships. Travelers necessarily leave their homes, and with it, part of their souls.


To my home in Houston, I much prefer visiting my son and his wife in NE Louisiana where he lives in a house in the woods surrounded by more woods with neighbors, few, but themselves lovers of the land and the homes that are part of them.


I sit out on his front porch in a rocking chair (I bought him three so I would have one to sit, rock and smoke my pipe in) an awning of trees shading while providing for jay birds, red birds, occasional tapping woodpeckers and the melodic mockingbird once in a while, with his three dogs alternately sleeping and watching me watch them, then occasionally bolting and chasing after a squirrel or a rabbit taking a shortcut. If early or late enough a deer prances by probably sourcing the pond in the back.

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It was this part of the South where my wife was born and reared before we married and became Houstonians. Her roots Louisiana, mine deep in the Mississippi earth. Our son loved this area of Louisiana so much he left the concrete city for this piece of land and dirt and gravel roads. It reminds me of Triggerfoot’s thought of the young grandson of Mr. Pink, Eugene, again in Memory’s Keep:
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I brought her home last year and I buried her in the Southern Louisiana soil of her birth. One day I will again lie beside her, our markers traditionally facing east. Not only will we be facing the rising sun, we will be facing Mississippi. We both will be smiling, for where we are and what we see.


​At some point in my youth, I was called upon to memorize a poem, Requiem, by Robert Louis Stevenson. It has locked itself in my memory forward until now.

There was a little dog down the street from us named Streety. My brother and I hadn’t got our own dog yet; that was five or six months in the future. So, we had adopted Streety as our own–though many in the neighborhood had done the same. He belonged to an elderly gentleman (I think he was about 80, though as a six-year-old, it was difficult to guess ages) down the street named Mr. Worley. My mother said Mr. Worley’s wife had died the day after I was born and Mr. Worley had taken Streety in shortly afterwards.


Streety was all over the neighborhood, a friend to all, a large mutt of mixed ancestry. All of this was typical of small town Southern life. Not that Yankees didn’t have small towns, dogs or friends, but they weren’t stranger oriented, as they were more interested in what you did (money) as opposed to where you were from (family). Besides, Yankees don’t love dogs as much as they prefer to kick them. But I’m a bit away from the story.


Streety was friendly and dirty: both most of the time. He loved the drainage ditches in front of the houses and when it rained he was in Hog Heaven. Often in the summer we would join him in the water-swept ditches, attempting to ride on his back (his mixed ancestry had some big dog in him) down to the end of the street where the ditch emptied. A day later after the water subsided we would spot Streety back in the ditch, enjoying the mud—this was from Hog Heaven to Pig-in-Slop. My mother allowed us the first but not the second, though she had, in a minor way, adopted Streety, too.


Streety sure loved Mr. Worley. We often saw Mr. Worley walk out onto his front porch and spread his arms as Streety bolted toward him, his front paws landing on the top of Mr. Worleys shoulders. Mr. Worley would turn his head to one side in order to avoid the face-on-slurp and lick. After a moment, Mr. Worley would sit in his chair and Streety would gather his 90 pounds or so at his feet, content just to be there, while Mr. Worley smoked his corn cob pipe. He was the only man I ever actually saw smoke a corn cob pipe in person.


Streety was so friendly and could size people up quickly that our neighborhood mailman actually brought Streety treats from time to time. Often Streety followed the mailman on his rounds, as if he were protecting him from some growling stray that might be about.


One day Streety was killed. A truck driver speeding down one of the neighborhood streets hit him broadside. He lay there bleeding from the mouth, his crumpled body twitching. But my friends and I knew the twitching was not a sign of life but of the end. We cried as much for Mr. Worley as for Streety I think. Mr. Worley walked slowly toward the street, his deliberate steps a sign he too knew Streety would never stand or run again. And we saw Mr. Worley rub his eye with the back of his hand. It was the first time I had seen a man cry.


As I got older I was to look back and remind myself that this was something coming to the South that would change its character to some extent. Cars and trucks racing through neighborhoods was not localism, not Southern.


I don’t know why, but though I saw Mr. Worley on the porch after that, I never again saw him smoke his pipe. My mother said that maybe he had quit smoking.


​I thought maybe he had just quit.

I love that old refrain. Of place
That wreathes with eternal song;
That suckles those whose love is
Of the South.
Oh, Dixie land

Where the deep-rooted ages
Are begot to memory in such view.
“Away, away” its chorus cries,
And cries its name,
Oh, Dixie land

Where God placed pastoral grips
Of His children enriched in spirit;
Heeding masculine pleas with code,
And all same, toil for His will.
Oh, Dixie Land

Existing from the flow of water
That clears or browns from
The reaches of the mountains,
Unto its deltas wide.
Oh, Dixie land

It brings rich dreams to us.
Those men of soil and life for
Their ladies strong of heart and mind;
Whose feminine manners reach out,
Oh, Dixie land

Though Yankee hymns, craven shameless
Lyrics cry for blood to flood the land;
And bury the blissful times
Of those whose home was sacred.
Oh, Dixie land

Its knights brave and dashing;
All did climb those bloody walls,
And waged and sang the final song,
To eternity; yes,
Oh, Dixie land

It is a love, a love and love,
That takes my mind to heights
Before unknown but to God;
And stirs my thoughts.
Oh, Dixie land

It lets me sleep with fertile dreams
Of the people and their world;
Such a place claims Injun Batter,
And Buckwheat cakes, too.
Oh, Dixie land

It can cry, while its tears softly run.
From folk: set to work, raised by prayer;
And strong of mind and spine, and
Always their souls to be lifted up.
Oh, Dixie Land

Of haranguing Yankees’ jealousies
My love will not be slaked;
That love but grows protecting itself,
While we stood; now stand, against such evil bent.
Oh, Dixie land

Oh Lord I love the life down wherein
It breathes from unlike chests.
But all and all molded as Southern,
And never, never will we annul.
Oh, Dixie land

It flies its flag within its heart.
And hears that Rebel’s cry-- brave shout,
In spite of those who hate
This valiant land of love and hope.
Oh, Dixie land

I love old Dixie. My home.
Love holds the well of dreams; wherefore
All mystic visions are special,
And are in God’s eyes, ascended splendor.
Oh, Dixie land.