Marjorie Sandor begins her lovely, lyrical memoir ("The Late Interiors: A Life Under Construction," Skyhorse Publishing, 208 pages, $22.95) describing nighttime trysts outside the greenhouses on the campus of the university in Oregon where she and her lover teach, their breaths fogging the glass in the winter chill as they peer inside. They are in midlife: She is married; he is newly divorced. It is a time of both anguish and joy.

Sandor divides the work into five seasons of her new life, summer 2000 to summer 2001, as she and her young daughter learn to navigate the treacherous shoals of part-time parenting and divided loyalties, her lover has emergency heart surgery, and the three of them settle into their "life on a brink all the time."

Sandor's poetic sensibility pervades the long and short essays on many topics that make up the work -- on wallpaper for her daughter's new room, on the diminishing numbers of swallows returning to Capistrano in Southern California where she grew up, on working the intransigent clay in her front flower beds, on the sad aftermath of a campus visit of an author whose wisdom and grace she admires, on the pleasure and hassles of restoring their kitchen to its Craftsman roots.

Her prose is lush and gorgeous as she describes the soul-soothing work she does in the "Gardener's Journal" entries seeded throughout the book: "I seem to have planted red things in little unexpected spots between mainly blues, purples, and yellows, so every once in a while, there's a hot flare in your eye when you look out: paprika yarrow, the Don Juan rose, bee balm, Kris's Penstemon in a pot, and my favorite, a violent little explosion of dianthus between a silver thyme and a lemon thyme."

Her language is contemplative and philosophic as she considers the "minor miracle" of having successfully fought to preserve from demolition part of the neighborhood in which they live, three cottages, a courtyard with big trees; this sweet victory includes, too, a scaled-down version of the projected high-rise student apartment building that is to abut their property. "We count ourselves lucky."

Germinating in Oregon's green and fertile Willamette Valley, Sandor's gardens -- the literal ones as well as the interior, figurative ones -- are rife with life and color. This is Sandor's fourth book, a shadowed yet hopeful version of new love in middle age, one cherished for its beauty, intensity and fragility.

Kathryn Lang is former senior editor at Southern Methodist University Press, where she acquired award-winning works of fiction and creative nonfiction for nearly 20 years.