Mélie is seventy-two, a widow, lives in a big country house and has a disease, about which she wishes to know the least possible. Clara, her adoptive ten year old niece is going to come to spend the summer with her, and Mélie certainly doesn’t want to ruin the pleasure of the long summer they’ll have together. A summer that must be special, a reservoir of precious memories. Clara is only one of the many people who rotate around Mélie like planets around the sun. There’s her daughter Fanette, Clara’s mom, a young physician with a volatile emotional life who, whenever possible, pops up on the horizon. There’s Gérard, fresh from his separation from Fanette. He’s also a physician, more specifically, Mélie’s doctor and accomplice. Then there’s Marcel, the best friend of Mélie’s deceased and unfaithful husband. Marcel, in a rest home, pretends to be an invalid, in the hope of repelling the long wave of life. For half a century he has been irresistibly attracted to her. Finally, there are friends that come and go: Antoine, a lost little chick, Clara’s classmate and boyfriend whose mom is dead; Bello, another of Fanette’s ex-boyfriends, a musician allergic to emotional commitments, but who adores being surrounded by other people’s children. Mélie’s country house, her conversation and her constant, delicate, discreet attention to others are like a light in the dark for all these people who are a bit banged up by life, and in the midst of barbecues, mouth-watering dinners, rides on tandem bikes, old furniture to repaint, a tree house to be built, spider webs and bamboo groves to watch growing, the summer passes much too fast. That summer that will bring Mélie the unexpected fruit of a late but great love, fully merited and fully savoured. One hundred and fifty years between the two of them. When one loves, numbers don’t count. Because you have to enjoy life day by day, just as it comes, for what it gives you.