This Is Home Now

Here is a sweeping account not only of an Iowa farm boy’s personal recollections of the years between 1913 and 1926 but of the slowly changing face of farm life. Floyd Robinson evokes the early years of hand planting, weeding, and harvesting, the heat in the fields at hay time, the mud or dirt roads, and the hard physical work needed to maintain an ever-growing young family. He touches on tragedies that occurred long before the days of the ambulance, the imagination used in children’s play, the harshness of the winters, and the never-ending cycles of the seasons. The author recalls with relish the good life he knew between 1913 and 1926, when the family improved its economic, social, and cultural status at a time when there were no government programs to help them. ‘This Is Home Now’ is written with a keen eye toward the way things were. Robinson comments wryly: “Driving through the Midwest some seventy years after the inception of this saga, one finds a checkerboard of paved highways with connecting well-graveled roads where narrow dirt roads had prevailed in 1913. A visit to the location of one remembered farmyard by one who had spent several strenuous years working, eating, and sleeping there proved indeed to be a futile venture into nostalgia.”