The Sanderlings — Pamela Taylor

Artist Eva Lindeborg has made her home in a small town on the windswept Oregon coast after fleeing an emotionally abusive marriage. Treasuring tranquility and solitude, her only ambition is the security of tenure in a college art department teeming with internecine politics. But Eva's peace ends abruptly when she falls in love, first with laidback motorcycle mechanic Jackson, a hunk going gently to seed, and then with orderly, controlling environmentalist Dean, both of whom carry their own secrets and wounds. Told with humor and compassion, and unfolding in a community of charming, poignant characters both human and animal, The Sanderlings explores the sometimes tumultuous path of love and the meaning of family. As I stand there taking in that weathered floor, I'm overcome by emotion, and I realize with absolute certainty that I want to live in this house. It isn't about the land or the privacy or all the cool disintegrating outbuildings. It's about this old place standing here, year after year, and the way that simply persevering becomes something greater than itself if you persevere long enough. Something richer, something like belonging. It feels as if this house has roots going down like a five-hundred-year-old tree, and no matter what happened in those years, whatever nature or Frank or Frank's people before him threw at it, it's still standing, still sheltering anybody who finds their way in. And I understand for the first time that it doesn't matter if ten generations of your family lived in a place, or none at all: houses hold their own history, and if we make this place our home we'll become part of that history, connected to all the generations that came before us, and connected to those that come long after we're gone. During a transcendent moment such as this, your eyes can be wide open without seeing anything, your system flooded with endorphins, your brain out to lunch. And that is the state I'm in, when I slowly realize that my unfocused gaze is being met by the unblinking stare of a huge mammal cornered against a closed door not ten feet away, a mammal I recognize from one of the most terrifying documentaries ever filmed: Death Has Four Paws: The Spread of Raccoon Strain Rabies. What happens next is a blur.