Emma and her four children are living in a communal family. It is a German-American religious colony. William Keil is the religious leader of the Missouri Bethelites Colony, and has settled this group in a location in Oregon known as "Aurora Mills," named after his daughter Aurora.

Emma is widowed, remarried and separated from her abusive husband. It is not a woman's place to speak in the communal family, something Emma with her feisty and independent nature finds hard to abide by.

Emma longs for a home of her own for her family, but when the colony grants her request and builds her a two door home things don't work out as she had planned. Emma believes one must be a good steward of one's trials as well as one's gifts. It is only if she stays wrapped in the comfort of old thoughts, refusing to unbind herself from the past to move forward, that problems will arise.

Emma knows that a hopeful soul learns to spin gold from the straw she’s been given. She has woven meaning into the loose threads that have taken her life from Missouri, to Washington State, to Oregon.