When Dresses Were a Sign of Love

Boston Herald

I am age 3 in the picture, or maybe just turned 4, sitting beside my mother who is leaning against a boulder in the great outdoors. Scrub pines and scraggly trees surround us. A lake is in the distance, gray-white, the same color as the gray-white sky.

The photo is black and white and lacks depth and texture and clarity. No matter how I stare, I can't bring it to life. The grass looks like fuzz. My mother and I look like paper dolls cut out somewhere else and placed at this scene.

In a sense we were. We were city people; the outdoors was foreign to us. Open space was something we saw in books. Trees grew in sidewalk cracks. Flowers bloomed in florist's windows.

Sometimes, though, on my father's day off, he would drive us to where the paved lots ended and the sprawling world began. I was 3 when he got his first car. It had a running board and used to stall on hills. My father loved it. My mother loved all the places it could take her.

I remember a trip to a lake on a spring day, planting a peach seed, my father telling me that a tree would grow from the seed and that the next time we came back we would eat nothing but peaches from that tree.

I remember drives to Canobie Lake and picnics. I remember adventures over skinny roads that wound through acres of woods. Traveling all of Sunday afternoon just to eat ice cream from a farm. Leaning into the front seat of the car, to listen to what my mother and father had to say.

I have all of these memories, but none of the day that picture of me and my mother was taken.

I look at the dresses we are wearing, short-sleeved, so I know it was a warm day. I look at the fitted waists, the Peter Pan collars, the full skirts, which ended a few inches below the knee, and I know, with a sudden ache, how much I was loved.

They are mother and daughter dresses. I can hear the phrase in my mother's voice, "Mother and daughter dresses." I don't recall these dresses. I don't know what color they were. I can't picture them hanging in a closet or on a clothes line or draped over the ironing board. I don't know how the fabric felt, soft or scratchy. And yet I know, looking at the pair of us, exactly what these dresses meant.

We had others - a pale yellow dress, sleeveless, ribbed in navy around the collar, with a belt that matched the ribbing. I used to wear a crinoline under mine. How old was I then? 5? 6? How long did we wear mother and daughter dresses? Where did my mother get them?

When did we stop dressing alike?

Did I one day say I was too big, too grown up to look like my mother? Did this make her sad? Or did the styles change and the manufacturers stop making them? 

I never saw a mother and daughter dress all the years my daughters were small. I'm not even sure I thought about them - until now. I may not have remembered them at all, if I hadn't been looking through a catalog and noticed on a page full of Easter decorations, a picture of a mother and two little girls wearing identical dresses - they were all ribbons and roses, Battenburg lace and crinoline flounces. 

My mother would have loved these dresses. She would have hung them on the line in the middle of the day. She would have bought us matching hats and white gloves and we would have worn the dresses to church and after church we would have strolled through Inman Square and visited my grandmother at the Shamrock Cafe.

And people who knew us would have tipped their hats. And people who didn't would have seen us and said, "Why, you must be mother and daughter.”

And this would have made my mother smile.