D. Clayton grew up between worlds — born in Cincinnati, shaped by the Kentucky summers of his grandfather’s farm in Germantown, and raised in North Carolina before the United States Navy took him somewhere new every few years for two decades. He retired as a veteran of twenty years of service and did what sailors from landlocked states always secretly intend to do.

He came home.

Home turned out to be Kentucky — specifically a place outside Danville where the land has a quality he’s never quite been able to explain to anyone who hasn’t felt it themselves. He has tried. This book is the most recent attempt.

He lives there now with Jestine, his remarkably patient wife, a rotating cast of ducks and chickens, and an orange tabby kitten who arrived one day and immediately began behaving as though he had always been there and always would be.

His name, it turned out, was Oliver.