November 2003 - The Point-lace Handkerchief

I carried the point-lace handkerchief twice this summer.

It resides in a handkerchief box from the late 1920's - a flat cardboard box with a picture of flowers on the cover - There's a piece of blue tissue paper around it to keep it from yellowing. It was at the Philadelphia daughter's house for a few years in a dressing table of about the same vintage as the box, and now is at the Boston daughter's house in the guest room desk drawer. For several years it was here in the Czech Republic in my dresser.

In the box with the handkerchief and the blue paper is a letter, written in 1930 or 1931, by my great Aunt Iva Clark, to "My dear niece Ruth", my mother, wishing her happy birthday.

She says that she is working on something "just for you", but had not yet finished it. [What? Maybe the off-white knitted coat which my mother wore every summer for over 50 years.] Aunt Iva apologizes that she is sending something used, and starts explaining that "Years ago I used to do fancy work..."

This is an ironic statement to the rest of us, because she really never stopped doing fancy work. I know of at least six family houses which have her handicrafts - knitted things, crocheted things, embroidered things. I have a photo of our grandson Benjamin, now 10 months old, wearing a sweater Aunt Iva made for me in 1938.

The point-lace however required younger eyesight and fingers.

I would imagine Aunt Iva did it in the late 1890's, perhaps when she & another woman had returned to Kansas after homesteading, on their own, in the Dakotas. She made two.

One she made for her sister, Anna, and the other for her mother, Catharine Anthony Clark. She said that my great grandmother Catharine Clark had carried it in the wedding of my grandparents, Herbert Anthony Clark to Dora Markham, in 1901 and in the wedding of Aunt Anna to Mr. Jillson in 1912.

My mother penciled notes at the bottom of Aunt Iva's letter, "I carried it in Dorothy Jillson's wedding to Walter Bailey in 1941 and at Jim's [my brother's] to Emmy Hoffman in 1966. I forgot it at yours & Julie Bailey's.

Now I have added my own penciled notes - I guess I could write that I forgot it at the weddings of our son and our daughters. But what I did write was that I had carried it during the christening of Benjamin and in the wedding of my niece, Becky Clark Hunt to John Monroe both in the summer of 2003.

And, I tell you, it was a lot of work! It kept falling out of wherever I tucked it! But I'm glad I did it.