Emma Meyer enjoys her early years in Dessau, Germany, also called the Garden Kingdom because of the classic buildings and landscaping inspired by Duke Leopold III Frederick Franz. At age sixteen, Emma enters the Bauhaus school, and moves with it to Berlin. When it's disbanded in a growing wave of autocracy and antisemitism, she finds work at Wertheim's department store, spending happy vacations in the Giant Mountains on the Czechoslovakia border. There she learns to ski and meets landscape designer Myron Goldstein. They marry in the historic Worlitz synagogue.
Surviving the onslaught of Kristallnacht, Emma and Myron flee Nazi Germany in 1939, making their way to Florida's Hollywood- by-the-sea, where they find a planned city with waterways carved out of the Myakka soil and a grand Broadway with three large roundabout circles, one holding a major hotel. After serving in WW II as an intelligence officer on clandestine missions in the Pacific, Myron returns to plan landscaping for an expanding Hollywood and then opens a garden center while she becomes a talented photographer competing successfully with time-honored males.
They raise a son, Jerry Gold, who excels as the high school quarterback of the Turf Trio, graduates from the University of Miami, and becomes an executive at an aerospace technology company. Urged on by cohorts in the Trio, he agrees to build a retirement home for their respective mothers and a host of others their age. The story of creating The Circle in an historic old hotel, and the day-to-day physical and mental trials of being very old for those who reside in this place one step below heaven are told by one who has lived long enough to tell it.