The Homecoming Seasons: An Irish Catholic Returns to a Changing Long Island is a moving memoir of a returning native's re-experience of his childhood community. After many years abroad, James P. MacGuire returned to New York and spent most of the 1980s at Time Inc., Macmillan, and the Manhattan Institute. After he married, 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 is the story of MacGuire's return to that 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. MacGuire skillfully weaves memories of his childhood in the almost hidden world with sketches of his family and their friends before updating his account with a lovingly detailed, diary-like depiction of returning. He captures in cinematic detail the wonder of the wetlands and surrounding natural world, the poignant life, death and rebirth of the community, the joys and sorrows of marriage and parenthood, and the profound exultation of safely shepherding two beloved sons to triumphant adulthood.