In the summer of 1965, teenager Paul Sutton, a northern Minnesota farm boy, takes a job at a gas station in town, where his strict religious upbringing is challenged by new people and experiences.
Worried that the coming of a new baby and her grandmother's serious illness will change the warm familiar life on her family's Vermont farm, ten-year-old Ariel combines her artistic talent with her grandmother's knowledge to make a very special quilt.
During the summer of 1932 when Lily is twelve years old, she is granted her two greatest wishes, to be far from the sister who torments her and to have a horse of her own, but she does not expect either the tragic events that bring this about or their consequences.