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My Heart Goes Home: A Hudson Valley Memoir
An account of a happy boyhood in a vanished time--the 1870s and '80s--in Dutchess County, New York. The author is the son of the famous historian, biographer, illustrator, editor.
190 pages, Paperback
First published October 1, 1997
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October 7, 2015
My Heart Goes Home is a wistful look back at what life was like for a kid in rural America in the second half of the nineteenth century. It’s told by a man who lived it, told with intimacy, detail, humor and frankness. His was a different world, a world that is gone forever, and to illustrate how gone it is, look out the window. Do you see farm animals wandering about? Peddlers coming up the road? Of course not, but here’s the sad part – do you see kids playing?
Thomas Sweet Lossing was born in 1872 and died in 1944. He grew up on a farm in New York’s Hudson Valley and toward the end of his life, in California and retired from a successful career as a civil engineer, his second wife, Elizabeth, convinced him to remember back to his youth and to put it all down on paper. Thank you, Mrs. Lossing.
It’s hard to believe, with all the minute detail in this book, the names, the places, even the number of steps leading into the church, that Mr. Lossing didn’t have something other than his memory to recollect those childhood days on the farm. A diary, perhaps, although the author doesn’t mention having kept one.
Lossing’s dad was prosperous. He was a gentleman farmer. That is to say, he was a man of letters, his days filled with books and writing, not chickens and goats, enough so he had a rather large annex built alongside the farmhouse for his personal library. I suppose he must have come out often enough to see to the running of the place, although he’s barely mentioned, and the kids are on their own and are expected to entertain themselves, which they do, in ways a kid today couldn’t even imagine. (Not that a kid in those days could imagine how kids entertain themselves today.)
There was no shortage of help on the farm and it’s a large, prosperous place, giving us the feel of an ante-bellum plantation. Most of the help were “coloreds.” They were paid wages and didn’t need whips or chains for motivation. Some of Thomas’s childhood friends were the sons and daughters of the help and there’s no master-slave barrier. There doesn’t come a time, as there did on the old plantations, when the childhood friendships between the whites and the blacks (who sometimes were siblings) were abruptly terminated.
There are plenty of civil war veterans around, an earlier “greatest generation” and it’s a small sample, but the local vets seemed to be having a difficult time readjusting to civilian life. Sound familiar?
So, was life better, back then?
Well, it was certainly more strenuous and adventurous.
Take the Blizzard of 88. If you pay attention to the weather, and more and more of us are finding we have to, and for reasons having more to do than just with convenience, we hear about this famous snow storm. We get it vividly from someone who lived through it. There was anxiety but no panic, (and no 24-hour news cycle to stoke the panic.) Folks, cut off from even their nearest neighbors, could only cope, and trust everyone else was coping too.
These were hardy folks.
Early in the book, it’s Thanksgiving and relatives come from fifteen miles away for dinner. The guests, Mom, Dad, and three kids, show up around noon and in a wagon driven by the dad. What follows is a long, exhausting day and just when I’m thinking how grateful they’ll all be, to bed down for the night, the guests get into their wagon and head for home. Fifteen miles in a wagon, in the dark, on roads not paved and after a full day of celebrating.
And did you ever wonder what a piglet did when it wandered into the cow barn and the worker, milking the cows, playfully squirted the piglet with milk from the cow’s teat? It did what any smart piglet would do. It opened its mouth.
Thomas Sweet Lossing was born in 1872 and died in 1944. He grew up on a farm in New York’s Hudson Valley and toward the end of his life, in California and retired from a successful career as a civil engineer, his second wife, Elizabeth, convinced him to remember back to his youth and to put it all down on paper. Thank you, Mrs. Lossing.
It’s hard to believe, with all the minute detail in this book, the names, the places, even the number of steps leading into the church, that Mr. Lossing didn’t have something other than his memory to recollect those childhood days on the farm. A diary, perhaps, although the author doesn’t mention having kept one.
Lossing’s dad was prosperous. He was a gentleman farmer. That is to say, he was a man of letters, his days filled with books and writing, not chickens and goats, enough so he had a rather large annex built alongside the farmhouse for his personal library. I suppose he must have come out often enough to see to the running of the place, although he’s barely mentioned, and the kids are on their own and are expected to entertain themselves, which they do, in ways a kid today couldn’t even imagine. (Not that a kid in those days could imagine how kids entertain themselves today.)
There was no shortage of help on the farm and it’s a large, prosperous place, giving us the feel of an ante-bellum plantation. Most of the help were “coloreds.” They were paid wages and didn’t need whips or chains for motivation. Some of Thomas’s childhood friends were the sons and daughters of the help and there’s no master-slave barrier. There doesn’t come a time, as there did on the old plantations, when the childhood friendships between the whites and the blacks (who sometimes were siblings) were abruptly terminated.
There are plenty of civil war veterans around, an earlier “greatest generation” and it’s a small sample, but the local vets seemed to be having a difficult time readjusting to civilian life. Sound familiar?
So, was life better, back then?
Well, it was certainly more strenuous and adventurous.
Take the Blizzard of 88. If you pay attention to the weather, and more and more of us are finding we have to, and for reasons having more to do than just with convenience, we hear about this famous snow storm. We get it vividly from someone who lived through it. There was anxiety but no panic, (and no 24-hour news cycle to stoke the panic.) Folks, cut off from even their nearest neighbors, could only cope, and trust everyone else was coping too.
These were hardy folks.
Early in the book, it’s Thanksgiving and relatives come from fifteen miles away for dinner. The guests, Mom, Dad, and three kids, show up around noon and in a wagon driven by the dad. What follows is a long, exhausting day and just when I’m thinking how grateful they’ll all be, to bed down for the night, the guests get into their wagon and head for home. Fifteen miles in a wagon, in the dark, on roads not paved and after a full day of celebrating.
And did you ever wonder what a piglet did when it wandered into the cow barn and the worker, milking the cows, playfully squirted the piglet with milk from the cow’s teat? It did what any smart piglet would do. It opened its mouth.
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