An old man reflects on his youth in the countryside in twentieth-century Kentucky, and thinks of the freedom now lost to industrialization and displacement.

In a small rural farm town, a middle-aged poet struggles with aging and finding meaning in his life.

An amateur innkeeper struggles to demonstrate her knowledge of urban sophistication to her important guests and fails to grasp the benefits of authenticity to one’s heritage, leading to her mother being better-received by the guests.

As the era of American farming comes to an end, it proves more difficult than expected for one young man to convince an old woman that she should leave the land for more fruitful prospects.

When a northern writer arrives in a rural Tennessee town to better understand the culture for his novel, he is put through a harrowing night by the menfolk who, in the course of an elaborate joke, convince him he has inadvertently killed the son of his hosts.

When a girl from the city impulsively marries a country boy and moves to his farm, she finds that his family’s dark history of violence will overcome them both if she cannot defeat it first.

A grandfather renews the family tradition of blueberry-picking on Ragged Mountain with his grandson, showing him secret landmarks of family legacy on the way.

A young woman travels out to rural Nebraska to be a schoolteacher and she becomes mesmerized by the beauty of the landscape. Her connection with the land piques the curiosity of a prudent domestic wife.

An American deserter from World War II stumbles upon a mysterious, isolated village in the French mountains.

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.