EARTHBOUND
EARTHBOUND
"there was no house anymore and no mother. my mother had left us."
For each of us, there is a moment—or a series of moments—that shapes the direction of our lives.
For Raymond Evans Ballinger, that moment came at the age of seven, when his mother abandoned her family, leaving two young sons behind. What followed was a lifetime shaped by that absence—and an enduring need to understand what it was about him that allowed his mother to leave.
Rooted in the land and memory of The Homestead where he was raised, Ballinger’s life unfolded across many paths. He became an actor, teacher, printer, cabdriver, horse breeder, husband, and father. Beneath it all remained the same question.
Earthbound is a multi-generational memoir and oral history that explores family, identity, loss, and the changing American experience.
Set against the disappearing farmland of Western New Jersey beginning in 1914, the book follows three generations whose lives are shaped by love, labor, memory, and abandonment as small family farms give way to an increasingly urbanized world---where traditional ideas of family, duty, and identity were being reshaped by the both the confines and the requirements of the modern world.
Earthbound is a powerful account of resilience, love, hate, and redemption. It is a richly detailed portrait of a society in transition— to an increasingly urbanized lifestyle, and where memory is all that remains.