Painting Churches is a surprising, refreshing story about relationships between parents and adult children. The elderly Churches, Gardner and Fanny, are in the process of moving from their spacious Beacon Hill house into a cottage. Daughter Mags is an artist who lives in Manhattan. Gardner is a Pulitzer Prize—winning poet, once as well known as Frost or Pound. Now he writes incoherent criticism of poetry and tries to teach his parakeet to recite “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard.” Fanny, a proper but eccentric Bostonian, buys shoes in thrift stores and wears wigs under her hat.