She refused every offer to pay extra for expedited delivery, every suggestion that she hire a second pair of hands, every well-meaning proposal from people who saw her success in the terms they understood: growth, scale, expansion.
The vocabulary of businesses that measure progress by getting bigger instead of getting better.
One woman waited fourteen months for a table built from a single trunk.
A kitchen table for a farmhouse in the Piedmont region, a house that had been in her family for four generations with a kitchen floor worn into valleys by the feet of people who'd cooked on it, eaten on it, and sat at tables on it that had been replaced three times because nobody had ever built one strong enough to hold the full weight of that much history.
She called at month ten.
Not angry exactly. Impatient in the way people become impatient when they've already waited longer than they've waited for anything else in their lives.
When the only thing keeping them from walking away is the suspicion that what they're waiting for might be worth every minute of the delay.
"Mrs. Ser, I need to know if this table is going to be ready by Christmas.
My daughter's family is coming. I've got a kitchen with no table in it."
Colleen was standing in the shop when she took the call, her free hand resting on the slab she'd been working for that commission.
A board so deeply figured that the waves in the grain seemed to shift direction depending on which side of the shop the light was coming from.
Gold in the morning, amber at noon, nearly red by late afternoon when the sun dropped low enough to catch the densest curls of reaction wood near the center.
"The wood isn't finished yet. Pushing it now means cracks by spring, gaps by summer.
A table your great-grandchildren would have to replace."
The line was quiet, not the silence of frustration, the silence of a person recalculating.
Adjusting their expectations to fit a timeline that doesn't belong to calendars or holidays or the human habit of wanting things to be ready before they're ready.
"How much longer?"
"Four months. Maybe three if the humidity cooperates, but I won't promise three."
The woman didn't complain again.
When the table arrived in March, delivered by Colleen herself in the borrowed flatbed she still used because buying a newer truck would have meant spending money that should go into wood, the woman met her in the driveway with her daughter beside her.
They carried the table into the kitchen together, set it on that worn floor, and stepped back.
The woman thanked her, not for the table, but for the honesty.
"Nobody tells you the truth about how long things take anymore. Everybody just tells you what you want to hear so you'll stop asking."
By the following spring, Colleen had a waiting list a full year long.