Category Archives: People

A butterfly barrette

Memories, People, Things, ,

Until 5 minutes ago I thought the type of design of this butterfly barrette was cloisonné. I was mistaken. I don’t know that it has a name. But that’s neither here nor there. This. now broken, metal butterfly barrette is one of a pair that I wore in my late teens. It’s important because another student in my college freshman botany class had the same barrettes. She seemed popular and well-known to the teacher. I admired her from afar — I am pretty sure she didn’t know I existed. I thought she was beautiful.

After that class I don’t know that I ever saw her at school, but I remembered her and I remembered her name. I was devastated when, one morning the following winter, it was announced on the local radio station that she’d died in a car accident.

That could have been the end of it. I might have kept the broken barrette and maybe wondered why I did so when I came across it nearly fifty years later, not remembering the young woman from my botany class who wore an identical pair of butterfly barrettes in her youth. I’ll never forget her because a little over two years after hearing about her death I met a man at a bar who, when he told me his name, I asked if he was related to that girl who died. He said she was his sister.

He and I married a few years after that.

An epilogue to the story is that our daughter sometimes looks like her Aunt Debbie. I once mused that perhaps what attracted me to Debbie was based on a premonition of what my daughter would look like as a young woman.

Clare
Debbie

Planting Ginny and Jack

Family, People, ,

Aunt Ginny died at the end of 2015, Uncle Jack followed her in 2020. They didn’t want funerals or obituaries. Uncle Jack told me that when he died he wanted his ashes mixed with Aunt Ginny’s and spread on his land in Mississippi. My cousin Joey, with whom the cremains resided for the past several months, said that Uncle Jack wanted their cremains scattered in the waterway in front of their house but Aunt Ginny disagreed because she couldn’t swim. That might be true — but she was actually repeating what her mother, my Grandma Green, said about her ashes.

That is good and all, but sometimes things don’t work out the way one hopes. He didn’t expect that their Trust would have been messed up so much that it took over three years to settle. By that time someone else lived on his property and when Dean and I came into possession of Aunt Ginny and Uncle Jack’s cremains we were reluctant to knock on their door and ask if we could spread their ashes on the property. We also didn’t want to pour them into the waterway because of Aunt Ginny’s request.

While we were still in Mississippi I reached out to Joey to see if he’d be willing to have them on his property, mixed together in a biodegradable urn, planted in the ground with a tree planted over them. Another cousin liked that idea as did my brother but Joey never got back to me. I think he was just happy to be rid of the ashes.

We brought Aunt Ginny and Uncle Jack back home, thinking maybe my brother could bury them on his property beneath a sapling (he wasn’t thrilled), or maybe we could find somewhere in Elgin or South Elgin might allow us to either bury or scatter them.

In the end I bought a kit from The Living Urn and when Clare was in town last month, put the cremains in the ground under a native butterfly bush. We had a small ceremony, played their song, Moon River, and that was that. Like I said on Facebook, it wasn’t what they wanted but it was the best we could do. The Mississippi cousins were neither welcoming nor helpful.

We were married in a cemetery and we now live in one.

Backdoor note

Family, Memories, People, ,

My mom and I had a difficult relationship when I was in high school and sometimes (often) we would have arguments over things she said and I misunderstood (sometimes purposely) or didn’t want to hear. One way for her to apologize without actually apologizing in person was to tape a typewritten note on the back door so I would see it before I walked inside. Once, after explaining to me what I might expect at my doctor’s appointment the next day (she thought I’d get a pelvic exam and I was horrified and lashed out) she typed an apology that she should not have told me in such detail — and also that the doctor’s appointment had been postponed. (In reality the appointment was simply a wellness check — no stirrups involved.)

Another time Mom taped a note to the back door was after I’d been through a very sad few days, having been told by my English boyfriend that he would not be able to come to the States that summer. She’d gotten the mail that afternoon and a letter from Jeremy had arrived. He’d written on the back of the envelope “GOLDEN NEWS INCLOSED! Coming in on a wing and a prayer.” Mom knew I would be happy so she typed it up and taped it to the back door.