Whenever anyone received a card from Ellie Streeter, a flurry of sequins tumbled out. My mother kept the sequins, stashing them in a kitchen drawer. Most of Ellie's sequins were in the shape of hearts.
A few weeks ago, I was unpacking a carton in our new flat in France. The carton contained a good deal of what my mother used to call “memorabilia”—stuff too precious to throw away but of absolutely no use to anyone whatsoever. My mother-in-law, naturally, had a similar collection, which I somehow managed to inherit.
Inside the carton was an envelope addressed to "Mami"—Thomas's grandmother. When I opened it, a shower of heart-shaped sequins spilled onto the floorboards of the new flat.
The message on the card was in Tom's handwriting. It wished Mami a happy Mother's Day and explained that although Sara had paid for the gift, it was really from him.
I do not recall the gift that went with this card, which shows a picture of two tortoises staring at each other, but I know for sure that those are Ellie Streeter's heart-shaped sequins. No doubt they were recycled by me, back when Tom was a wee lad, ending up in France.
Ellie was one of many women, my mother's close friends, who all pitched in to help each other raise their kids. The Tucker and Streeter houses shared a fenceline, and we kids were in and out of the Streeter house constantly, often several times a day. We played Kick the Can on the Streeter lawn, ate peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches at the Streeter table, and listened to Peter, Paul and Mary on the Streeter record player while playing board games on the Streeters' living room carpet.
My mother's friends were classy women, and strong like burros. Together they weathered the blows and celebrated the victories that come with raising kids. Because of them, I grew up feeling almost ridiculously safe, convinced that the adults in my life were absolutely capable of dealing with any evil that might threaten me or my brothers, sisters, cousins, or friends. These women remained friends their entire lives. Two days before my mother died, Ellie left her house—which she rarely did anymore—and walked around the corner to our kitchen door. She was my mother's last visitor outside of family.
The little hearts were still drifting about the house—popping up on floors and countertops—when I received the news, a few weeks ago, that Ellie had died. Being in France, I was unable to attend her memorial, to my regret—I would have loved to have shared memories of Ellie with her family and friends. Some of my own memories I put into An Irruption of Owls, my memoir about growing up in Randolph.
When I'm going through a really rough patch, along the lines of the past six months, it helps to remember my mother and her friends and relations—Aunt Lois, Ellen Reid, the Lunch Bunch (Dolly McKinney, Betsy Arnold, Ellie Streeter), and many more—and all the crap they endured, and how they always got through it with a minimum of self-pity and a ton of courage.
There's a passage in Owls where I go to visit Ellie, a few months after my mother died, and she says, "It's okay to grieve." After that, she moved to assisted living up near one of her kids, and my life changed. But I still have a few little things to remember her by, as well as Aunt Lois's tangerine scarf, and Dolly's Snoopy pen ("For writing the good things"), and the sand dollars that my mother and I collected on a trip to Georgia. I have Ellen Reid's recipe for fiddlehead quiche. And I have the example these women set, and the love they showered on us, not just when we were kids but forever after.
Above: My mother's collection of sequins from Ellie. Below: A sequin that made it to France.
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