Housekeeping

In the remote town of Fingerbone, built beside a deep mountain lake that once swallowed a passenger train, sisters Ruth and Lucille are raised by a succession of relatives after their mother's death. Eventually their aunt Sylvie, a transient who has spent years riding boxcars, comes to keep house. Sylvie's idea of housekeeping is unlike anyone else's: leaves drift into the parlor, the lights stay off, and the boundary between indoors and the wild outside begins to dissolve. As Lucille pulls toward the ordinary world and Ruth drifts toward Sylvie's rootless way of being, Robinson builds a plot-light meditation on impermanence, memory, and the slow erosion of every structure people build against loss.