The 1960s was the time of Viet Nam and Woodstock, men walking on the moon and free love. It was a time of pulling away from old traditions and a foreshadowing of what was to come for women's rights. For girls in Utah the choices were few besides marriage and motherhood. The author lived in Salt Lake during that restless time. She dreamed of a college degree, an exciting career in Archaeology and most of all Billy, the high school boy who had captured her heart. But life and fate had different plans, taking her on a twisted and sometimes lonely detour, a journey of forced marriage, husband and children and eventually forbidden love. Along the way she realized that each place she lived, each house she inhabited, taught her something and each took something away. But amid her wandering she always strived for Maternal Love - a way to keep her children safe. She traded a university dormitory for a tiny, castaway house where, untried and inexperienced, she struggled to become a wife and a good mother. Then she moved to the edge; the edge of the desert, the edge of adulthood where she forged bonds with young friends but came face to face with the fragility of life and death's dark permanence. In the valley of the golden trees she discovered that beauty was deceiving and the people and creatures who lived there could be both noble and cruel. Through the struggle to hold on to what was hers, to keep her children safe, she fought those forces and in the effort found her strength and her voice. And finally, before her 30th birthday she came back to the beginning - back to the city where she was born and the view of the mountains she loved and her long ago dreams turned into violence.