Set in 1932, at the height of prohibition and the growing American eugenics movement, the state of Vermont passes a law allowing for sexual sterilization of "idiots, imbeciles, feeble minded or insane persons likely to procreate." Dormancy follows a young woman and her new husband who work the land and earn a small income herding sheep and working with lumber. The couple is lured into a rural clinic where they subjected to the sadistic goals of the doctors and eugenics field workers. For this modest family, life will never be quite the same...

When a disillusioned New Yorker's father dies, he goes home to Cape Cod and prepares the house for sale while sharing it with his father's temperamental live-in boyfriend. Grieving, they circle each other, butt heads, and negotiate how to remember the man they both loved, and the significance of what he left behind.