It was 2002. My post-college job at Big Chemical had – after seven pretty awful years that weren’t wasted because they became integral to who I am now – finally become untenable and I quit in February without any real plan of what came next. I put my furniture in storage and my parents painted the sunny front bedroom in their old farmhouse pale lemon for me. They put my mom’s paintings on the walls and a new quilt on the bed, and my two cats and I moved home.

It was cold, living in northern Michigan. It snowed all that March and April and sometimes I was sad. I tried to keep a routine; in the mornings I walked on the treadmill and then fired up my enormous old Gateway and printed out resumes. The high point was being home with my parents, some of my favorite people. I felt worried sometimes, and anxious. Watching their shows on television with them, eating my mom’s good cooking and tagging along when they went to the little strip mall over the hill, I was never lonely. It had a bait and tackle store, a little card store, and a Ben Franklin.

My parents did their big grocery shop at Ben Franklin and occasionally my mom and I would go next door and peruse the little card shop. One day my mom came home with a little amber bead necklace with a striped fish charm. They were handmade by a girl in town and the card store had a few on display at the counter.

The next time my mom went shopping, I went with her. Ben Franklin had a grocery store and a hardware store and a little crafting section and while my mom did her shopping I wandered over to look. It would be another few years before I taught myself how to knit, and my forays into crochet and embroidery had been interesting but not especially fruitful. That day, though, I saw bags and bags of seed beads, clasps and elastic, and despite my limited budget, I thought about that little amber fish necklace and made a few tentative selections.

I made a few clumsy necklaces but within a few weeks, I had an interview downstate at Widget Central, and soon, was hired and moving again. The cats were packed up and the yellow bedroom turned polite and impersonal and although I didn’t know it then, I was starting what would be a 20+ year adventure. The bead box was forgotten.

Over the holidays, cleaning out my home office, I came across that forgotten bead box.