This suite of narrative poems focuses on Florine Morris Close, the author's maternal grandmother, whose hardscrabble upbringing and young adult years in Cumberland and the nearby western Pennsylvania towns resulted in chaos not only in her life but in that of her young daughter., who would go on to become a revered teacher and administrator in Baltimore County. Spanning the family's emigration from Wales in the mid-19th century to the author's adolescence in the 1960's, the poems are frank, direct free-verse narratives of separation, loss, and survival of women in an era in which education, social advancement, and economic challenges thwarted their girlhood dreams of escape into a life of comfort and ease.