When an impoverished man shows up to a wealthy woman's door in dire need of help, she gives him ten dollars and tries to send him on his way. The man insists that he return the next day to thank her husband for the money, but she isn't quite sure if things are as they seem.

After his mother passes, a middle-aged man reminisces on the relationship between himself, his mother, and their house in rural Pennsylvania.

A writer summers with his mistress and part of her family. The group runs into one of his former students, and they all smoke together.

A middle-aged, divorced man learns of three deaths of people he once knew. The news of each brings him slight relief from the shame he feels about his failed marriage.

When loving each other becomes inconvenient, a man separates from his wife of 20 years and struggles to realize that the end of marriage must also bring an end to the life they were supposed to live together.

A group of five families gather at a farmhouse in Vermont over Columbus Day weekend for their annual vacation. As the weekend drags on, they begin to realize that life has become more complicated and they may be slowly drifting apart.

When a man's wife gets swept up in the Civil Rights movement in the 1960s, he agrees to tag along on a march in Boston while sick in order to save their shaky marriage.

As a boy grows to adulthood in the years encompassing WWII, and his understanding of the world changes, so too does his perception of his schoolteacher father evolve from respectable teacher to embarrassing clown to free-spirited man.

Desperate to feel some sense of human connection, an old man begins to look into the secrets of the land he owns and the people who lived there before him.

When a fourteen-year-old boy moves with his family to a farm town, he reads a book that leads him to have a crisis of faith and he begins to question what really happens after death.