In a series of commentaries on the human condition — life, truth, happiness, death — a spinster sister takes in her dead sister’s children; a man is entranced by the endless waves which roll and crash in the ocean; a carpenter wrestles with the burden of being everyone’s confidante; a dying railroad crossing watchman shares a simple but complex wisdom.

Two men from the same small town share stories about a pivotal moment from their past, revealing a decades-old coincidence that explains their drastically different paths.

On the brink of death, an elderly man recounts his life to his great grandson, revealing that his mother's schizophrenic delusions of an otherworldly fantasy land were no delusions at all.

A son tells a series of stories, most of them about his father and stepfather. As the son describes a robbery that took place at his house in high school and his experiences with his father, a former Jehovah's Witness and current alcoholic, he begins to recall details from his childhood.

A father tells his twenty-year-old son how he was married suddenly to his son's mother at a young age.

When a young boy witnesses an odd event from the window of his small-town house, he begins to doubt the stability of the world around him.

On a visit to his old family farm in the Great Plains, a man recalls his tumultuous relationship with his now-deceased brother. In the process, he must reckon with the continued influence of familial trauma and confront his own ambiguous role in his brother's death.

Stuck with a broken engine in the middle of icy cold weather, a traveler goes to a nearby farm to seek help. He comes across a boy with a greater problem than his own, and changes his plans to help out the boy and his sick grandfather.

After one of her father's notebooks is recovered from an icecap, a woman recalls the love story between her mother, a rural woman who always wanted adventure, and her father, an adventurous explorer who disappeared on a voyage to the Arctic.

After a chance encounter with a mysterious teenage girl, a lonely woman gets pulled into the girl's sinister family drama.