An Old-Fashioned Friendship

Remember my shoes? And those beautiful 1930s silver and crystal shoe clips my friend lent me? They were the first, and I thought, the only act of premarital kindness I would receive from her, but I was wrong - delightfully so!

My senior citizen friend is the last of a literally vanishing breed of well-bred and well-behaved ladies. Ladies who lunch, and wear kid-leather gloves, and have impossibly perfect handwriting all the time - not just when they concentrate, furrow their brow, and stick out their (collective)tongue.

Maybe it was because I wore skirts all the time, or maybe it was because I wore pearls instead of multiple piercings, but for whatever reason, when my friend and I met, we stuck together like pressed flowers. Two of a kind - "bosom friends" as Anne Gilbert née Shirley would have called it.

I don't really know why she decided to make me, a co-worker, the recipient of such old-school generosity.

Maybe it was because I didn't laugh at her addiction to Sex and the City (any other Charlottes out there? :) ), and made a date to go see the movie with her.

Maybe it was because I listened with wide-eyed rapture to her recalling her own wedding, her EIGHT showers (hello? I need a crystal shower, people!), and adventures as a social butterfly, a bride, then as the leading society matron on the Canadian Prairies.

Or maybe it was because I listened, period.

Behold my something borrowed....

 

1910 linen handkerchief, hand-tatted (is that the word?) by her grandmother, and used by her mother at her wedding:

 

Isn't that UNBELIEVABLE? Look at those details, those tiny little knots and loops:

 

And so I wouldn't have to carry the handkerchief down the aisle in my bouquet-clutching hands, she lent me something even more spectacular....

Loosely wrapped in yellowing tissue, nestled in a weathered blue box with a barely discernably crest stamped on its top was this:

A tiny wristlet, covered in real crystals, worn by my friend's grandmother on her wedding day in 1908, along with a fan/bouquet "made of real ostritch feathers."

My friend's mother also wore it on her wrist during her wedding in 1930, with the same fan of ostritch feathers, dyed blue, and to continue the family tradition, my friend wore it on her wrist during her wedding in the 1960s.

But because she never had daughters, I will proudly carry her handkerchief in this beautiful, gorgeous, lipstick and tear-stained purse on my wedding day...

....along with all of the happy hopes of the three beautiful brides who wore it in the hundred years before me.

Thank you for making me a part of that, Barbara.