Heaven’s lace, 2019

The lace was never meant for warmth. Even though the first Saturday of February 1959 was unseasonably warm, a mink stole adorned the young bride as she left the church in her white silk gown, capped with lace from just above the waist moving into sleeves down each arm and ending in a point on top of her hand.

A 20-year-old bride, Betty Clifford, marrying a man four years her senior, Les Gibson, who lived with his mom on the StreetWhereSheLived.

And so Feb. 7, 1958, dawned warm and dry, and a morning wedding at St. Liborius Catholic Church in old North St. Louis begat a wedding brunch at the Heidelberg Inn, which begat a wedding reception at the old Swiss Hall on Arsenal St. It was a St. Louis wedding through and through, with the three essential ingredients: beer, music and mostaccioli.

There was no honeymoon. Just a half-hour drive north to a three-bedroom, one-bath ranch home in a brand new neighborhood in Florissant, Missouri, a growing suburb in north St. Louis County.

For the next 35 years, there she would live with Les and together they would raise four children — three boys and a girl.

Betty, a derivative of Elizabeth, was an apt name for a mom of the 1960s and ’70s: June Cleaver without the pearls, Carol Brady without Alice. She made sure God was at the center of the family, and if she had any vices they were Pepsi-Cola, popular fiction and Winston cigarettes, not always in that order.

By 1994, the year leukemia got the best of her at the age of 55, she had raised a lawyer, a businessman, a journalist and, ultimately, a captain in the United States Navy. And the family that buried her on a cold day in March had grown to include two daughters- and a son-in-law, and two rambunctious grandsons on whom she believed the sun rose and the sun set.

Over the next decade, there’d be one more daughter-in-law and seven more grandkids — the third just six weeks after her death. She’d have thought the sun rose and set with them, too.

The dress? Tinged with dirt on its edges with a small mostoccioli-stain, the gown was rolled up and placed in a bag for a dry cleaning it never received.

My Mom’s Stuff

I was her only daughter, so somehow, the dress came into my possession. I don’t recall ever seeing it growing up. I never played dress-up with it, never contemplated its lace, never dreamed what it would be like to wear during my own wedding. It just appeared in my basement a few years after she died, along with other items I salvaged from our house in Florissant when my dad remarried four years later and sold our childhood home. I was a young mother with a full-time job then, so the dress was pushed further back into the milieu that was simply My Mom’s Stuff.

Meanwhile, that family she taught to pray together stayed together, taking reunion trips over the years with Dad to places such as Breckenridge, Yellowstone, Gettysburg, the Outer Banks, with the grandkids at various stages of their lives and alway the centers of attention.

And then this: The first next-generation wedding. The oldest son of her oldest son, Dan Gibson, married Jess Reeder of Paducah, Ken., Aug. 10, 2013. Jess was the girl Danny first noticed freshman year in a math class at the University of Evansville, the girl he’d linger in the hallway waiting for after class in the hopes she’d linger too.

She lingered all the way to the altar of the Neu Chapel on that same campus seven years later, on a sun-kissed Saturday afternoon.

And a part of the wedding: A ring-bearer pillow, made from the dress, adorned with Heaven’s Lace.

A postscript

Six years later, a second next-generation wedding. Nick, her second grandson and the only other grandchild she got to hug, is engaged to be married to the lovely Haley O’Toole — a match Mizzou Made.

We couldn’t be happier for both of them and can’t wait to celebrate with the O’Toole Family. Every time Haley came around, the family would be like, “She is so awesome… Nick what are you waiting for?” But all things in their own time, as Betty knew all too well.

So soon there will be another pillow adorned with the lace from a wedding dress of long ago. This time to be carried by two little guys named Ramsey and Max, the sons of Danny and Jess who are about the same age as the two little guys in the picture above left.

Life comes full circle.