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.