The Veranda is a well crafted account of a complicated life from the vantage point of middle age. A woman has hunkered down in a modest retreat that's perched on a hillside in the Central American jungle. Fortified by her conviction that all complexity can be understood by writing about it, she spends every day on her veranda striving to gain perspective on her hodgepodge of a life. From the streets of Paris, to the beaches of Cape Cod, to the subway tunnels of New York, she recreates people, places, events, love affairs, and business endeavors in an effort to find patterns that might tell her something. But she's hampered by the insistent intrusion of life around her: beautiful wildlife beckons, her housekeeper brings news from town, and friends stop by with their stories. In the end she capitulates and the story of life on the veranda begins for real.