Aug. 21, 1924
     Atho I have lived in the city for three years I find it impossible to collect myself – to stand off and view my life and wants related to it, objectively.
     Back in Salem, Ohio I wrote one fall in a walk along the Little Beaver, of how I longed for a home of my own on a sunny hillside with my wife in the house singing and working; and children playing in the yard.  These have all come to me, except the home on the hillside.  I have an ideal companion for a wife and two babies that mean everything to me, but I don’t savor it to the full as I think I should, as the fulfillment of my daydream.  It seems as thought I ought to play with my babies by some stream bank, surrounded by cotton-wood saplings with dangling catkins, and glistening willows with black and white buds.  Only once the other evening I forgot I was in the city.  I was playing “Turkey in the Straw” on the Victrola while Mary also was toddling back and forth between Dorothy and myself crowing and laughing.  Life suddenly seemed full and over-flowing and the air full of sunshine and the odor of goldenrod.