Home.

Most everyone can picture at least one place where they truly feel at home. A place that engenders emotions so comforting they can’t help but elicit a certain belonging: a location where all the senses work in harmony to provide a recollection of better times. The best of times.

For Loyd, the protagonist in these tales, home is not where he was born. His earliest life was so painful a different place had to rise up to replace the location of his birth. He needed a world where good memories reigned. A world where the smells, sounds, and feelings of maternal love conquered the sadness and shame of a boy who was different from other little boys but didn't understand how or why.

Focusing on the first twenty years of his life, LOYD: Tender Boy in a Rugged Land recalls the stories of someone who has loved Southwestern Missouri, particularly McDonald County, all his life. The land, characters, spirituality, and even the paranormal all play important parts in creating a place he calls home.

Loyd has traveled much of this country and has visited exotic locations around the world. He lacks only a couple thousand miles from having circumnavigated the globe on his journeys, but ultimately, the Ozarks call him back home every time.

They always will.

Someday, a part of Loyd will rest well in the land he adopted as his own, and the land will know it did right by him.