The Homecoming Seasons: An Irish Catholic Returns to a Changing Long Island is James P. MacGuire's poignant memoir of returning to his childhood hometown on the South Shore of Long Island to raise his own family, re-encountering its natural wetland beauty, his late parents' now older friends, and making new ones in a community undergoing transition. The quarter century that the book details is filled with life, death, triumph, and loss, and chronicles, above and below its surface, a fragile yet ultimately resilient world.

The Homecoming Seasons: An Irish Catholic Returns to a Changing Long Island is a deeply moving memoir of a returning native's re-experience of his childhood community. After many years abroad as a graduate student at Cambridge, a Peace Corps Volunteer in Thailand, and as a country program director of health care and agricultural programs in central Africa, James MacGuire returned to New York and spent most of the 1980s at Time Inc., Macmillan and the Manhattan Institute.

In 1990 he married and several years later, with a second child on the way, he and his wife decamped from Manhattan for a small enclave called the Isle of Wight in the village of Lawrence on the south shore of Long Island, where MacGuire had grown up.

This book tells the story of MacGuire’s return to this world—how it had evolved from ancient times; been inhabited by indigenous peoples; colonized by the Dutch and English; and then grew from a sparsely populated agricultural corner of western Long Island to an early summer resort, then an outer, and, finally, an inner suburb of New York City.

Jamie MacGuire skillfully weaves memories of his childhood in this almost hidden world with sketches of his family and their friends before updating his account with a lovingly detailed, diary-like depiction of returning. His parents’ friends now much older, the community more diverse, as he, his wife and children make new friends as they proceed into this changed world. He captures in cinematic detail the wonder of the wetlands and surrounding natural world, the poignant life, death and rebirth of community, the joys and sorrows of marriage and parenthood, and the profound exultation of safely shepherding two beloved sons to triumphant adulthood.

This is an uplifting literary memoir that will earn and deserve the widest possible audience.

Author’s Note

Chapter 1: Introduction

Chapter 2: The Isle of Wight

Chapter 3: Early Years, 1994–1997

Chapter 4: Looking Back at the Sixties

Chapter 5: High Hopes/ Steep Struggles

Chapter 6: Losses, 2001–2004

Chapter 7: A New Chapter, 2005–2008

Chapter 8: Passages

Chapter 9: Superstorm Sandy

Chapter 10: Lanie, 2013–2015

Chapter 11: Renewal, 2016

Chapter 12: Pierce and Alex

Chapter 13: Twenty-five Years and Moving On

Chapter 14: Envoi

Index

About the Author