Horseradish Bitter Truths You Can't Avoid Chapter One Home The difference between a house and a home is like the difference between a man and a woman--it might be embarrassing to explain, but it would be very unusual to get them confused. There is something marvelous about returning home at the end of a long day, even if there is tuna fish for dinner. There are some people who believe that home is where one hangs one's hat, but these people tend to live in closets and on little pegs. An old cowboy song celebrates home on the range, where deer and antelope play, but anyone who has seen deer and antelope knows that when they are frolicking they scarcely look where they are flinging their hooves, which is why cowboys have been pummeled almost to extinction. It is always sad when someone leaves home, unless they are simply going around the corner and will return in a few minutes with ice-cream sandwiches. One's home is like a delicious piece of pie you order in a restaurant on a country road one cozy evening--the best piece of pie you have ever eaten in your life--and can never find again. After you leave home, you may find yourself feeling homesick, even if you have a new home that has nicer wallpaper and a more efficient dishwasher than the home in which you grew up, and no matter how many times you visit you may never quite cure yourself of the fluttery, homesick feeling in your stomach. Homesickness can even strike you when you are still living at home, but a home that has changed over the years, and you long for the time--even if such a time existed only in your imagination--when your home was as delicious as you remember. You may search your family and your mind--just as you might search dark and winding country roads--trying to recapture the best time in your life, so that you might cure your homesickness with a second slice of that distant, faraway pie, but your search will end in vain, as you have lost the map that told you where to turn, and the restaurant has long ago burned down, and the baker who made the pie has gotten tired of waiting for you and has devoted her life to making tomato paste instead, but she is no good at it, and now you are lost in life, the darkness closing in on you, with nothing but a sad flutter in your stomach and a sour acidic taste in your mouth. An American writer of my acquaintance titled one of his books You Can't Go Home Again , but he was not necessarily talking to you. Horseradish Bitter Truths You Can't Avoid . Copyright © by Lemony Snicket. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved. Available now wherever books are sold. Excerpted from Horseradish: Bitter Truths You Can't Avoid by Lemony Snicket All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
