A boy’s account of growing up through the rituals of life on an ancestral farm in middle Georgia between the big wars. It is a rueful, humorous story of the people in one rural county, but the telling cuts so deep it breaks through to the universal. Reminiscent of To Kill a Mockingbird, Tom Sawyer, and The Catcher in the Rye, Run With the Horsemen is the powerfully moving and delightfully endearing story of Porter Osborne Jr.’s journey to adulthood.

In this sequel to Run With the Horsemen, the redoubtable Porter Osborne, Jr., a little older and slightly more worldly, leaves home for college. The year is 1938, but the story is timeless.

Porter leaves the dusty security of his rural Georgia home—armed with the self-assurance of having been “Raised Right”—and goes off to Willingham University. Neither Porter nor the university will ever be the same again.

With her characteristic warmth and good humor, Celestine Sibley invites us into her garden at Sweet Apple, the 1848 log cabin that her readers grew to know through Sibley’s many columns and books about her life there.

While sharing her experiences with gardening, she weaves rich images of friends and loved ones into the narrative of her adventures in learning about the land and nature. Her subjects are commonplace and timeless—the experience of beginning a garden and the work it involves; the joys of growing your own vegetables; the challenges of the compost pile and a bewildering variety of garden insects; and the endless delights of flower arranging.

Sibley does not prescribe guidelines on gardening so much as she describes in amusing detail the trails and frustrations as well as the enormous satisfaction of gardening. As Sibley says, “It’s not what you grow that makes you a rich and successful gardener…. The doing is the thing.” Likewise, it’s not the subjects that make this book so endearing—it’s Celestine’s observations on them.

This is a collection of personal essays on gardening for readers who love to garden, no matter how fruitful—or fruitless—their efforts.

Sweet Apple—the very name evokes a rural charm. That’s what Celestine Sibley discovered on her initial visit to the primitive log cabin built in 1844. And that’s what she continued to find after many years living in the house, lovingly restores and filled with the memories of her own family’s life there.

“How an old abandoned house can take hold of a reasonably sane woman’s heart, fill her mind, lap up her energy and change her life is still something of a mystery to me,” Sibley muses. By the time you have savored her tale of restoring the old house, Sweet Apple’s charm will no longer be a mystery. The dilapidated ruin into which Sibley invested her heart and energy became a community project and Sibley and her family grew to love the colorful and interesting lifestyle of their neighborhood.

This is far more, however, than a story about breathing new life into an old house and moving from the city to the country. It is a story of personal discovery and fulfillment laced with wry humor and good common sense. Sibley’s vision of living and loving is so clear, so pure, that no reader can put down this book without feeling enriched. The sampling of Southern recipes that she has collected here are also certain to delight.

“Maybe the reason I have so many hang-ups about the way I look is because there are so many hang downs. Oh, me!” The irrepressible Hattie McNair and her friends at the FairAcres Retirement Home are back!

This time around, a degenerative eye condition doesn’t stop Hattie from participating and recording in her diary all that is going on around her, reminiscing about the past and ruminating on the upcoming millennium. There is much to celebrate and much to lament as Hattie is saddened by the illness of her friend Louly and shocked by a storm that damages many of the homes in her small town. A variety show—complete with a Hattie-led Kitchen Band, washboards, kazoos, and all!—raises money to help the town recover. The end of the year finds the FairAcres crew creating a special holiday celebration with each resident contributing an ornament for the tree and a poignant memory to lift up the spirits.

With grace and humor, Wilder once again gently pokes fun at growing older, all the while reflecting on the special wisdom gained from aging, and the challenges and losses that must be faced.

Join everybody’s favorite busybody, Hattie McNair, and her fellow residents at the FairAcres Retirement Home on another uplifting adventure!

Knee replacement surgery doesn’t slow down the irrepressible Hattie McNair. This time around, she and her fellow residents at the FairAcres Retirement Home are involved in money-making schemes: they enter a car-naming contest and organize a storytelling night to raise money for a swimming pool. There is also mystery in the air when the sour-looking portrait of the retirement home corporation founder, affectionately known as “old Pukey Face,” goes missing, True to form, Hattie makes it her business to get to the bottom of it. And with warm-hearted encouragement (and a little meddling) she lends a hand to her third-grade friend Amanda and her family during a difficult time.

With grace and humor Wilder gently pokes fun at growing older, all the while reflecting on the special wisdom gained from aging, and the challenges and losses that must be faced.

At the age of 92 with more than 500,000 copies of her four best-selling books in print, you’d think that author Effie Leland Wilder would be content to rest on her laurels. Fortunately, in response to the floods of letters requesting another visit to FairAcres, Mrs. Wilder invites us back for another delightfully uplifting and entertaining adventure.

In her familiar journal entries, Hattie takes note of the laughter that lighten the days of her fellow FairAcre “inmates” as well as the tears at the loss of loved ones. Familiar neighbor Mr. C. befriends a young man with some legal troubles and sets him back on the right path, with the assistance of Hattie and company. The residents pitch in to help build a house for a FairAcres employee, demonstrating the same indomitable spirit that has made Wilder’s previous books so popular. And Hattie’s writing success continues as she enters a short story contest. With grace and humor Wilder gently pokes fun at growing older, all the while reflecting on the special wisdom gained from aging, and the challenges and losses that must be faced.

In this breathtaking collection of stories, celebrated author and poet Robert Morgan portrays the lives and history of a strong-limbed, strong-willed people: the settlers of the Blue Ridge Mountains and their descendants.

Struggling to survive in an ancient mountain landscape that alternately thwarts their efforts and infuses them with joy and vitality, Morgan’s people undergo the transition from the Indian skirmishes of the post-Revolutionary War era to the trailer parks of the present day. With one eye on the land itself and the other on its inhabitants, Morgan poignantly portrays a history of change, of transformation in the landscape, in humanity’s relationship to the earth, and in people’s relationships with each other. His intimate knowledge of the region he portrays makes this collection a valuable social history. At the same time, Morgan offers a moving theme which is universal and eternal—the majestic immutability of the earth and the heroic human struggle to live, love, and create new life.

Focusing on one people in one place, Morgan addresses the themes that matter to all people in all places: birth and death, love and loss, joy and sorrow, the necessity for remembrance, and the inevitability of forgetting.