The Flower Girl

                                                                                                                                        

                

1949

When I was six, Dolly, my Great Aunt Mamie’s youngest, was getting married and Ba (my maternal grandmother and Dolly’s aunt) and I rode the train from Tampa to Troy, Alabama. I was to be the flower girl and Ba, using her treadle Singer sewing machine, had made me a dress of rosebud -sprinkled white satin with a sweetheart neckline and puffed sleeves.

The train ride was enormously exciting—we had one of those little private compartments with (oh joy) a bed that let down from above the window. And making our shaky way along the rattling corridor to the dining car and its white tablecloths was little short of magic.

In Troy, Aunt Mamie’s house was overflowing with family and Ba and I were given a bed in the attic, next to the big attic fan through whose opening we could hear the buzz of activity below. (Many years later, when Ba was in her nineties, bedridden after a stroke, she kept saying that there was a wedding going on downstairs.)

I remember nothing of the wedding but recall that at the reception I hung out with the ring bearer, a little boy named Rusty. Was his hair dark red? I think so. There was a fella playing the piano and I asked him to play Home on the Range—my favorite song at the time.

Over fifty years later, I had a letter from Dolly. She was facing terminal cancer and was using her time to contact everyone who’d ever been important in her life. I don’t think I’d seen her since the wedding, but she thanked me lovingly for the part I’d played on one of the happiest days of her life.