Larry Billups has come to the hard decision that he must move his family from the country neighborhood where they have always lived to Washington, D.C. He knows that he needs to make a better living for them, although moving means giving up their relatives, old friends, their church, and the pleasures of the water. Stuart, his son, resists the whole idea, and tries to persuade his parents to let him stay behind with his grandfather. His older sister, Kim, can hardly wait to get to the city, where she expects to discover a more exciting kind of life. Didi, the youngest child, is a passive observer of the events that surround her.
