Easter Parade Down Memory Lane

When I was two, my Aunt Nell shamed my mother Audrey into making me a dress. The second child, after a boy, I was accustomed to running around in hand-me-down t-shirts and cloth diapers, if not jeans. My hair was cut boy-short, too, though not as short as my brother’s.

Aunt Nell was nothing if not persuasive. Easter Sunday, 1958, my mother washed me and slicked my hair back with VO-5 before slipping on a dress stitched in her spare time while waiting for my brother Charles, who was born just before Easter, to be born. I have a photograph my father took of me, too, wearing my new dress and holding an Easter basket. I also wore a hat.

The dress, tucked away with mementos of the past, has yellowed some with age, but it is just as beautiful. No more than 18 inches long, from bodice to skirt, and eight inches wide at the waist, this dress looks like a doll’s dress. I guess it was, to reveal the nickname my big brother John gave me: Baby Doll. It’s hard to believe a grownup was ever that little.

Cotton organza, this Easter dress was the palest blue that has now faded into white. Only the pale robin egg blue cotton stitches hint at the original color of a dress that was worn that Sunday and time and time again as I discovered what it felt like to whirl around in a skirt, even in mud puddles.

The bodice has a round yoke with nylon lace stitched by hand. Like the hem, it has neat stitches that my mother’s mother taught her to make. The pin-tucked bodice reaches a tightly gathered skirt with loops for holding a ribbon. And if this swirl of a skirt is not enough, there’s the attached underskirt that is more tightly gathered, with a handmade ruffle on the bottom. Four snaps line the back of the dress, snaps also stitched in blue thread.

I know that my mother, like so many mothers back then, starched and ironed until the skirt stood out. In the Easter photograph, the skirt is perched over my little tomboy feet wearing Mary Janes. There is another photograph of me in the dress later that year, barefoot and dirty at the town park, with the dress hanging loose in the summer humidity.

This Easter dress was the first in a long parade of dresses my mother began stitching for me to wear on Easter and to school. Looking at what remains of her handiwork is like visiting a museum of fabrics. From the wispy organza in that first dress to the sturdy pique that lines a hat she made to go with another Easter dress, my dresses say a lot about cotton.

If organza is a sheer fabric, pique is thicker. With tightly woven threads that fall in parallel raised lines, it puckers like a mouth that has sucked on too many jelly beans. My handmade Easter bonnet, circa 1964, that is lined in pique is a blue-green plaid on the outside. This hat with its tailored ruffle still fits, but it doesn’t quite go with my current attire.

In 1967, my mother stitched a pink dotted Swiss dress lined in white satin, A-line with puffed sleeves. I still have it. Although it looks as much like a doll’s dress as the organza dress does, because I was a skinny girl, I remember wearing this muslin dress with the flocked dots and thinking that I looked like Twiggy, the world’s first supermodel. In reality, I looked like a little girl.

Felicia Mitchell. First published in Washington County News (Abingdon, VA), 12 April 2006, p. A4. WCN is a publication of Media General Operations. Copyright 2006.