Ruth is not an easy mother to live up to. Oxford educated, pilot in the Air Transport Auxiliary during WWII, and a complex, fascinating woman, she marries a Canadian navigator and returns with him to a small farm in Nova Scotia, where she throws herself into her new life with characteristic enthusiasm.
Their daughter Jane despairs at ever approaching life with Ruth's confidence. Jane lives in Australia with her dairy farmer husband but along the way she's discovering that she's exchanged living up to her mother for living up to her husband.
Now widowed and in England for the first time in fifty years, Ruth dies in her cousin's home and Jane flies over from Australia to make the funeral arrangements. She returns to Canada with her mother's ashes and, once there, spends a weekend alone in her childhood home - two critical days and nights of discovery and decision.
