Boise Blue was a downtown landmark that sold art supplies. It was for me what a candy store must have been to children earlier in Boise’s history. The shelves brimmed with brushes and paints, and I would daydream about what I might do with a fancy new fan brush, or twenty feet of raw canvas, or a tube of extravagant Cobalt blue. The room that most beckoned me was full of easels, sitting empty and quietly upright, waiting for me. They could be seen through the front windows, standing tall like mannequins in the latest fashions in the displays at The Mode, a department store just down the street.