Where's the Moon?

Book excerpt: When you lose your parents just as you have left home for graduate school—glad to finally be away from a life and 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 accident when she was twenty-three, 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, a writer and musician, returns to Florida to reconcile with the life she had there. Reconnecting with old friends and long-forgotten places, she confronts the transformation of wetland real estate she knew as a child into south Florida suburbs and the booming Space Coast—a transformation her father enthusiastically if not altogether successfully promoted. She revisits the frustrations and aspirations of her youth and musical awakening, comes to a deeper understanding of the meaning of the cultural shifts she experienced in the sixties, and achieves a new appreciation of the history and aspirations of the two people who meant the most to her.