Earlier this week, an e-mail arrived from McCall's in Golden, Colorado, in response to a couple I had sent them. I had asked once again when to expect the return of the final quilts. At one point I had been told they would be shipped out to us in early December. The e-mail contained reasurring news.
First, they had not sent the quilts out in the flurry of holiday mailings. One of my fears was "Music of the Night" would be lost in a corner of a warehouse storing undeliverable packages. I imagined a box at the bottom of a pile, its side burst under the weight of other packages, and my quilt becoming home to a family of field mice.
Second, the package containing my quilt was not in a semi-trailer that had blown over during the fierce winds rampaging across the highways in Colorado. In that imagining, boxes were strewn across a snow and ice encrusted road and were slammed into by other huge trucks. I could see those boxes being ripped apart under wheels by truckers valiantly trying to avoid other vehicles. In the blinding storm, quilts would be tugged out of open cartons to fly away into the stormy night only to be found high in the wilderness by a pack of wolves.
Third, an unwary secretary hurrying to her desk in the morning, tripped over the strap of a briefcase left lying beside a vacant chair. In her wild windmilling to avoid tumbling to the ground, the cardboard container she was carrying in one hand sailed across the room and smacked into a quilt hanging on the wall - my quilt. The container held four lattes intended as a morning wake-up for the secretary and three colleagues. While friends gathered around asking if she was all right and helping her gather herself and her belongings, my quilt wound up unnoticed, soaking up those lattes.
In my fourth improbable scenario, one night the cleaners were at work. One of them was vacuuming the room where the 12 quilts are hanging when another cleaner stopped to chat. As they joked and talked about their holidays, the hose of the vacuum held on the shoulder of one cleaner, quietly ate the wings off the dragonflies, sucked up the owl, and beheaded the grandmother on my quilt.
What wild imaginings have plagued me this past month! Now I can laugh at them because the quilts are being returned and are not being held ransom by a rogue employee. The delay was due to a misunderstanding. The person charged with taking care of the mailing thought it had been decided to avoid the holidays by mailing in January. She (who as far as I know doesn't even drink lattes) is going to send me the tracking number once "Music" is on its way.
Happy New Year!
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