WWII ended only months ago and a father worries that his daughter doesn't understand why we was gone for many of her formative years. Considering he was fighting in the war, you can only assume his 8 year-old is a moron--else wise she would have known where he was, why he was gone and the sorts of things he was doing! During a picnic with her girl scout friends and her parents, the kid disappears. The police arrive and tell the parents that there's quicksand near the park (?????????????????????) and perhaps she wandered into it and died. Quicksand...right next to a park...right!!
A whole bunch of years suddenly pass and the parents are now oldsters. As she lies in bed waiting to die, the mother is saying that their past decades were a waste--due to false hope that their daughter would somehow return. They apparently wrote a book about all this and how craptastic their life was due to the disappearance of the kid. The husband, in response, whines about how he cannot live without her. Suddenly, there's a knock on the door...their little wayward brat has returned home--and she looks just like she did in 1946.
From my description, you can tell I didn't like it. The show was manipulative, saccharine and just didn't make any sense. Well made, technically, but as was too often the case with the series, it was apparently written by chimps...