High tide in Tucson -- Creation stories -- Making peace -- In case you ever want to go home again -- How Mr. Dewey Decimal saved my life -- Life without go-go boots -- The household zen -- Semper fi -- The muscle mystique -- Civil disobedience at breakfast -- Somebody's baby -- Paradise lost -- Confessions of a reluctant rock goddess -- Stone soup -- The spaces between -- Postcards from the imaginary mom -- The memory place -- The vibrations of Djoogbe -- Infernal paradise -- In the belly of the beast -- Jabberwocky -- The forest in the seeds -- Careful what you let in the door -- The not-so-deadly sin -- Reprise.

Twenty-six essays explore themes of family, community, and the natural world while considering such specific topics as modern motherhood, paper dolls, and high-tide oysters. Barbara Kingsolver has entertained and touched the lives of legions of readers with her critically acclaimed and bestselling novels The Bean Trees, Animal Dreams, and Pigs in Heaven. In these twenty-five newly conceived essays, she returns once again to her favored literary terrain to explore the themes of family, community, and the natural world. With the eyes of a scientist and the vision of a poet, Barbara Kingsolver writes about notions as diverse as modern motherhood, the history of private property, and the suspended citizenship of humans in the animal kingdom. Kingsolver's canny pursuit of meaning from an inscrutable world compels us to find instructions for life in surprising places: a museum of atomic bomb relics, a West African voodoo love charm, an iconographic family of paper dolls, the ethics of a wild pig who persistently invades a garden, a battle of wills with a two-year-old, or a troop of oysters who observe high tide in the middle of Illinois.