The author offers a chronicle of growing up in a small town in America's heartland, offering portraits of her family and her encounters with the complexities of the adult world, romance, and small-town life during the 1960s and 1970s.

At last, Mitford's rector and lifelong bachelor, Father Tim, has married his talented and vivacious neighbor, Cynthia. Now, of course, they must face love's challenges: new sleeping arrangements for Father Tim's sofa-sized dog, Cynthia's urge to decorate the rectory Italian-villa-style, and the growing pains of the thrown-away boy who's become like a son to the rector. Add a life-changing camping trip, the arrival of the town's first policewoman,...

In 1869, Gloriana Womack's family is much smaller since smallpox killed her mother and two of her siblings. She lives in a modest cottage in Duluth, Minnesota, with her father and young brother, and she has dedicated her life to holding her tiny, fractured family together--especially as her father is frequently gone on long fishing trips. Their livelihood may come from the waters of Lake Superior, but storms on the lake can be dangerous, even to those...

The lyrics of a Cajun waltz may be dark as midnight with heartache and trouble, but still the music swings. The same goes for what happens after a shifty musician and a lonely shopgirl let destiny sweep them into an ill-suited marriage in swampy southwest Louisiana on the eve of the Depression.

In the early 1920s, photographer Nellie Burns leaves Chicago to find adventure and a career in the West. She lands in Ketchum, Idaho. Out one night photographing moonshadows on snow, she discovers and photographs a dead body. When the body disappears and her negatives are stolen, she joins the chase to solve the mystery and find her negatives. As Nellie unravels the mystery of the missing body, she encounters a tangled web of revenge, opium addiction,...

Hotshot rookie race car Lightning McQueen is living life in the fast lane until he hits a detour on his way to the most important race of his life. Stranded in Radiator Springs, a forgotten town on old Route 66, he meets Sally, Mater, Doc Hudson, and a variety of quirky characters who help him discover that there's more to life than trophies and fame.

This collection takes its title from the introductory essay, in which the author describes the house where he and his wife, Hilary, have lived for more than thirty years, near a parkland corridor running for several miles on the western edge of Minneapolis. The essays that follow describe day-to-day events at home-the seasons, the sky, the garden, the passing deer, the trees, the birds, and the sounds of the night-and forays into town to farmers'...