Something old into something new
This appeared in the South County Times Aug. 16, 2013. My word count is pretty strict — which is a good thing at times because it forces you to write tight. But here it is again as I would have written it had there been no constraints:
It’s only natural I would have the dress. I am her only daughter, and, while I don’t remember it growing up, somehow my mother’s silk wedding gown with the arm-length lace bodice ended up in my basement.
The dress made its debut Feb. 7, 1959, when Betty Clifford married Les Gibson at St. Liborius Catholic Church in their north St. Louis neighborhood. That wedding day would be its one and only appearance, loosely folded and stuffed afterward into a clear plastic bag in anticipation of a dry cleaning it never received.
And in that bag it stayed through 35 years of a life together, raising a family until Betty’s untimely death at age 55 from leukemia. A few years after that, it got moved to my basement along with china, pictures and other knick-knacks that has come to be known as My Mom’s Stuff.
I have a lot of My Mom’s Stuff. Nineteen years gone, her presence still looms large in my family – not in a debilitating, grief-stricken way, but more of an uplifting warmth that manifests itself when least expected, as in finding a sand dollar on a beach or a rainbow at the bottom of a waterfall.
And so shortly after the engagement of my nephew Dan Gibson, her oldest of nine grandchildren (of which she would know only Danny and his brother Nick), it occurred to me that maybe it was time to get that dress off the shelf.
If only I’d gotten her sewing gene. I spent months Googling “new uses for old dresses” and “wedding dress makeover” and other such phrases, getting ideas but never feeling confident to send the dress to an unknown entity. Until my husband Tom said, “Lucy can do that.”
Lucy is the proprietor of Lucy’s Dressmaking & Alterations on Hampton Ave. in south St. Louis. She’s been mending for Tom for years, and saved me from years of sewing Boy Scout merit badges. I had never met Lucy until the day I walked in her shop with the dress in the bag and said, “Here.”
I needed a ring bearer pillow, I told her, but what was left unsaid was that I wanted so much more. I wanted something old made into something new; something sorrowed into something true. Not just for one grandchild’s wedding. Eventually, I would need nine of something from this dress and I wanted what material she didn’t use back.
Can you help me? Lucy nodded, and said, “I can do that.”
Two weeks later, I held in my hand a ring bearer’s pillow, made out of silk, covered in lace. It took my breath away. She returned the dress, too, in the same bag in whichI handed it to her.
Last Saturday, Dan married the lovely Jess Reeder of Paducah, Ky., on the campus of the University of Evansville, where they met seven years earlier. Among the members of the wedding party: his youngest cousin Zachary Gibson, ring bearer, carrying a pillow made from a dress, covered in lace, straight from heaven.
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