Rose Emma Parmlee reflects on her 90 years as she compiles a diary that she began in her youth. As she records the migration of a family from England, to the new England, to Iowa, Rose exposes a family's deepest secrets, including her own unrecoverable relationship with her mother, cousins a bit too close by blood and water, and an entire lineage her siblings never knew. Through an elegantly accessible, minimalist style, like the silence and whispers of all dark secrets, Rose takes the reader into her confidence to join an epistolary journey through intricate relationships, complicated ancestries, and intertwining lives that shaped a watershed and every woman's place within it.