dear friends,

When I was in second grade I danced in The Rag Coat, which was inspired by the picture book with the same name. If you haven't read it, there's a girl who needs a coat to go to school and so all the quilting mothers decide to put their scraps together and make her a coat. There's more to the story, but I love the idea that her coat has pieces of all these different people's lives. There's pieces of a baby blanket, a fancy dress from New York, a woolen jacket, fishing pants, and her dad's old feed sack for the lining. Here is a description from the book:

"Each day I hurried home to see my coat. It was looking like the colors of the fall days--the yellow-golds of the birch leaves, the silvery grays and purples of the sky, the deep greens and browns of the pines, and the rusty reds of the chimney bricks--all the colors Papa would have chosen. I decided to put a piece of his work jacket in there. It just seemed right."

I'm telling you this because I just want those of you who read this to know that you definitely make up part of who I am--I would be missing pieces without you! Thanks for donating pieces of your lives to mine! Especially with this mission, I feel so much support from friends and family, and that is what will "keep me warm" inside when I'm there. That's what patches me up, so to speak. Okay, enough with the puns and metaphors.

Te amo. (I love you.)