All my life I’ve had a habit of misplacing something important. Generally this doesn’t mean losing it forever. Sometimes it’s just a day or a month or it can be a few years.
For the past few years I couldn’t find my grandmother’s wedding dress. If you’ve read Scrap: Salvaging a Family this obviously is NOT the dress of my father’s mother, but my mother’s mother. She shows up only as a couple of mentions in the book, but she was my favorite relative and shows up in a few poems in Rooted and Winged. She also was a writer–of tiny humorous stories–and her role model was Jo in Little Women.
She is my role model for being a Grandma.
Can you imagine how I felt when I opened a box I hadn’t seen in a long time and saw her dress inside it? I had put it in an acid-free box and then put it away. Other stuff ended up in front of it and as time went on I kept searching the same places over and over, not finding it. Until I did.
WOOT! My grandparents were married in South Bend, Indiana on May 21, 1932. I wrote about the wedding on The Family Kalamazoo blog years ago.
In 1931, Grandpa had asked Grandma to marry him as he drove her in the car from Kalamazoo to her parents’ farm in Caledonia. But Grandma had to wait a year to teach and give the money to her family who were struggling financially because of the Great Depression.
Also, my grandfather’s mother, Cora, was dying of cancer.
So there was no big celebration for my grandparents. Aunt Jen, Cora’s sister stayed with Cora while they got married. They drove to South Bend, Indiana, although Grandpa was from Kalamazoo and Grandma from Caledonia, two southwestern Michigan towns. They could get a marriage license and marry immediately in South Bend.
Traveling with them were Grandma’s sister Vena and her boyfriend Al Stimson’s cousin, Herb Thorpe. They had forgotten to get flowers, so they plucked spirea along the way.
This is the dress and a close-up of the art deco belt buckle.
Just think, in six years this dress will be 100 years old.
Weren’t they the cutest?
Do you misplace things regularly or does this not happen to you? I keep wondering if it’s my ADHD.
It took me eighteen years from the first story I wrote about my father’s workshop in our basement until publication for Scrap: Salvaging a Family. Some of that time was “down time,” including from the day ELJ Editions accepted the manuscript until it was actually published. So in the meantime I was writing other things, usually poetry, but some micro or flash fiction, too.
