"You won't lose any of my customers,” Aunt Beth said and pulled Harriet into a suffocating hug. “I love you, sweetie, and I have full confidence in you. And here,” she said, and handed Harriet a lavender envelope. “Open this after I leave."

She pulled up the handle on her large rolling suitcase then tied a ribbon of purple fabric that coordinated with the purple nylon of her suitcase to the upright piece. She pushed the suitcase out onto the front porch and shouldered the matching carry-on bag.

"There's my taxi,” she said and kissed Harriet's cheek. “Stop worrying. Everything's going to be just fine, you'll see."

With that, she whirled around, summoned the taxi driver onto the porch then followed him and her suitcase to the cab. Just like that, she was gone.

Harriet looked down at the envelope in her hand. She turned it over but found nothing but lavender paper and a sealed flap. No information popped to the surface to explain why Aunt Beth had given it to her. She tucked it into the pocket of her grey hooded sweatshirt and went back into the house.

One of the few possessions she had brought with her from Oakland was her cat Fred. Fred was big and grey and fuzzy-she wasn't sure from one moment to the next if she owned him or was just in his employ. She did know if she didn't get his milk bowl on the floor in the next sixty seconds there would be hell to pay.

"Here you go, Fred,” she said and set his dish down on the blue fish-shaped placemat he'd brought with him from California. While he went to work on the milk, she poured a half-cup of his high-protein, low-residue, hairball-removing kibbles into his second ceramic dish.

When he was taken care of, she quickly ate a bowl of Kix and went upstairs to take a shower. In little more than an hour, her first customer would be knocking on the studio door.

She pondered as she washed what the first quilters might think if they saw how much the craft had changed since the first woman put needle to fabric in an effort to make a bed cover.