"This is the night when those questions you have had over the years may all be answered, my son. I'm thankful to have lived long enough to be with you when the door opens on this side of time; would that I could walk through with you again, and be in your father's arms once more. The impossibility of that is one of the many things that made my days with him a poem." Thus begins Frances "Frankie" Wheat's recounting of an experience sixty years earlier, when, as a professor of nineteenth-century American literature, she was transported back in time to observe some of her heroes, and is made forty years younger in the process. She establishes a friendship with Henry David Thoreau, ever-conscious of her need not to upset anything that will change the course of Time and his importance to the future; yet as they enjoy having Picnics at Walden Pond, Frankie becomes suspicious of a larger agenda.