We see fragments. We imagine the rest.

From his second-floor office in an older neighbourhood of Woodstock, New Brunswick, Brian Usher began noticing the people who passed beneath the mature maple tree outside his home.

Children walked home from school. Teenagers stopped with bicycles. Parents accompanied young children. Neighbours passed with dogs. Some faces became familiar long before their names were known. Sometimes people paused beneath the tree. Sometimes they simply continued along the cracked sidewalk and disappeared from view.

Those fleeting encounters became Under the Maple Tree – a collection of linked literary stories and reflections about the lives we glimpse but can never fully know. Observation opens into imagination as ordinary moments become stories of friendship and separation, childhood and growing older, family, memory, loss, home, neighbourliness and the small acts through which strangers gradually become familiar.

Woodstock is more than a backdrop. Its streets, old houses, rivers, gardens, dogs, school routes and changing neighbourhoods give the collection its particular sense of place. Yet the questions reach well beyond one New Brunswick town. How much can we know about another person from the brief part of a life we happen to witness? What do we assume when we see someone alone, hesitant, hurried or confident? When does a place where we live begin to feel like home?

The people who inspired some of these observations are real. The stories imagined around them are not necessarily theirs. Names, conversations and circumstances may be invented, altered or combined. That boundary between seeing and knowing becomes one of the book’s central concerns.

Warm, observant and gently humorous, Under the Maple Tree is a book about ordinary lives, the passage of time and the quiet ways people become part of one another’s stories.