My mother and her mother lived 500+ miles apart at a time when travel was slow. Although they didn't visit regularly, they didn't lose touch because they wrote letters to one another.
Every Saturday morning, my mother sat at her small writing desk in her bedroom and pounded out letters on her black Underwood typewriter. I remember that she liked Crane's stationery, that her blue-and-white ashtray (perhaps Delft) was shaped as a fish, that she always had a lit cigarette, and that she wrote with lively detail and thoughtful concentration. I never read her letters, which she signed with a fountain pen in blue ink. That would have been presumptuous.
But I have imagined them: reports of her garden -- the making of new beds bordered in stone, the planting and blooming; the children and our progress and misdeeds; her community and volunteer work; her work with the Altar Guild and the latest hangings she and other ladies fashioned on silk.
People have told me that my mother was charming and that my grandmother was, as an older friend once told me, imposing. One thing I remember is the sound of their voices and laughter, the deep resonance of their Virginia-rolled vowels. My grandmother lived into old age (she died at 99), while my mother died in youthful middle age (at 47). It's strange now to know that Dear, my grandmother, lived for more years after Mother's death than Mother lived in her whole life.
But their love for each other lives still in this photograph, as does the mutual pleasure they evidently took in the other's company.
Until she died when I was 16, my mother made all my clothes (except bathing suits and, as I needed them, underwear beyond little girl frilly panties). She even ordered Harris tweed from Scotland to make my first real winter coat. She took me to fabric stores to shop for patterns and fabrics; she asked me to select yarns for sweaters.
I think her favorite dress-making came at Easter when she made a new dress and Daddy took a picture of the two of us posing in the yard. (Based on the outward thrust of my chin, I think this must have been 1952 or 1953, prior to the effects of orthodonture.) Here we are on Memory Lane in front of her rock garden, which she planned, planted, and maintained. In the bed to her right, in a spot hidden by the tree, she killed a copperhead with a hoe while I watched from a bed of day lillies just below the cross-tie steps in front of us. In that same bed she planted the galax Calla sent from camp in the fall.
Now the photograph is framed with the newspaper clipping on which Mother wrote, "first attempt." I don't know when it appeared, but I assume it must have been in The Birmingham News on a Mother's Day prior to her wedding to my father. Not only did my mother make clothes, but she also made occasional poems, of the sentimental and the humorous kinds. Read the poem, and you will see that Mother followed a tradition set by grandmother, whom we called "Dear."
