With detailed insight into how people lived in Louisiana in the early 1950s, this novel charts the life of a young woman whose fear of a dead-end future on her family's poverty stricken farm tempts her to temporarily escape to California. Out of her element she nevertheless finds pure love, but experiences a loss from which she cannot recover. Navigating the rapids and eddies of life, she is confined by an almost unbearable grief. Yet, there is a tough resiliency at her inner core that struggles to put the past, present and future where they belong.