When your parents are killed just as you have left home for college-glad to finally be away from a life and a place you found stifling-how do you make your way in a world with no home to go back to? For Ann McCutchan, whose parents died in a car crash when she was barely twenty years old, the answer was to keep moving, away from the dream her mom and dad had so hopefully embraced in her childhood and away from the locus of that dream, the state of Florida in the 1960s.

In this coming-of-age memoir, McCutchan goes back to Florida to reconcile with the life she had there. Reconnecting with old friends and with long forgotten places, she confronts the transformation of the wetland real estate she knew as a child into the Space Coast, a transformation her father enthusiastically if not altogether successfully promoted. She revisits the youthful torment of her artistic ambitions, the meaning of the cultural shift s she experienced in the sixties, and the inevitable misapprehension of the history and aspirations of the two people who meant the most to her.