Charles E. Burchfield, Journals, Vol. 35, August 15, 1922

I believe that man can ask few things better of life than to come back to former scenes and find them not only unchanged or dimmed, but in reality more definite than before.
Shut up in Buffalo I thought of summer evenings at our home; how the late summer shadows screened the flower garden and pansy & petunias seemed to have sad thoughts of their own when the mournful church-bells began to toll; I thought of the gaunt warped clap-boarded houses in mid-afternoon sunshine when the sun stands still and eternity yawns over the wide prairies. I thought of all the quaint or bitter memories of the small towns I knew and dreaded returning to them, wondering if they were gone with the death of the former life I led.
Nothing has changed and never will change; it is mine forever.
The city-bred person is apt to think that the inhabitants of the “waste places,” in their ignorance of certain superficial forms of modernity & hurried living of cities, are as a consequence, backward. But the contrary is true; the city-bred man thought he has a great variety to choose from must know them all superficially — but, the man of the hinterland, tho he only have one thing to contemplate, can do, must do it thoroughly —
Charles E. Burchfield, August 15, 1922