Memory's Keep
by James Everett Kibler (Pelican Publishing Company, $22)

"Perhaps one not born of this place would fail to understand the curious air of dilapidation that lay over Mister Pink's world. At first maybe his impulse might be to hustle in and feverishly clean and tidy things up. He might work and work until his very soul cried out. Then, his mission accomplished, and straightening his back, he would look around with an expression of delight to think he had shaped things to his liking, had conquered the wildness of the country, brought it under his iron will. But how quickly that expression would vanish, would change to bewilderment straight. True, the stranger had been told by those longer and wiser on the land—those folks like Mister Pink himself—that the minute he'd turn his back on this tidied up work, it would return to its quiet disorder, its lush rank growth and mellow decay. But the stranger not bred to the rhythm of this place just thought this was local talk and local laziness—an excuse not to bustling about and doing.

But now with some experience and wisdom, the stranger would learn that indeed this was not just talk, for he soon comprehended that born in the body, and bred in the inexorable bare bone of this land was always an air of transience, of the passing and fleeting, and that this same flux of slow time suffused all.…It was simply a place too fertile for the hands and will of man to shape and keep penned within man-imposed bounds.…"--excerpted from the book