After she drives her daughter Cara Andolini to Oregon College for her freshman year, six year widowed Angeleno Amy Andolini will not only be an empty nester, but will be all alone with an open schedule, she, a former accountant, not having worked since she and her deceased husband Joe Andolini had Cara eighteen years ago. Cara chose to go away to college to exert a little independence away from her mother, despite they having a close relationship.
Amy will have the time to visit with her old friends Cheryl and Bert Morgan, Director of Admissions and an Economics professor at the college respectively, before she heads back to Los Angeles to figure out the next phase of her life. Despite Amy wanting to give Cara her space, Amy, with Cara's blessing, decides to accept Cheryl's offer for a six week position to co-organize this year's Harvest Festival, an annual fundraiser for the Agriculture Department.
The problem, as Cheryl explains it, is that the festival has been in the red the last few years and is threatened to be canceled after this year if it does not show a profit. Amy's co-organizer is Professor Ferris in the Agriculture Department, he who is big into the agriculture side of things in having the festival be a glorified farmer's market, and short on the festivities.
In formally meeting Professor Ferris, Amy finds that he is "Noah", the man she thought was just a campus gardener and the person with who she has been trading barbs since she arrived in town. Amy and Noah need to bridge some gaps in ideals - he who had no idea about the festival not making money since he was never involved with it from that end - to make the festival a success.
In the process, they, unspoken, start to fall for each other. The question then becomes if they will be able to tell the other their feelings and make their relationship a long term one as Amy, out of a sense of history, just figures she has to go back to Los Angeles and give Cara her space, and as Noah, who has always had a sense of wanderlust in never staying in one place for more than a few years, ponders accepting an offer at the University of Sydney in Australia starting the following semester.