Full Circle

I've always liked a full circle skirt. Because of the way it is cut, the waist has no bunchy gathers or even flat pleats to thicken your waistline. It is smooth and just big enough to go around you. And then its four panels flare wildly so that at the hemline your skirt makes a full circle. Not that you could really know that unless you take the skirt off and lay it out on the floor. Then, sure enough, it does lie in a full, two-dimensional circle.

 

We were often the recipients of hand-me-downs when we were young. Not from townspeople, as I remember, but from distant relatives or old friends of my mother, Eileen. More than this I do not know. Who were these people? Eileen never spoke of old friends she'd known before she married our father and became a small-town mother of six.

 

So how did she know someone who custom-made machine-knit dresses? We received a box one day with half a dozen elegant and totally inappropriate fine-knit dresses, some made of pastel metallic yarns that shimmered and glistened with movement. The dresses were all of a size—too small for my big-boned mother, who might have been able to carry off their style with aplomb. But they did fit me, a skinny 16-year-old. As I remember, Eileen altered them using her excellent dressmaking skills, but it was hard to disguise the shiny knits and make them look like a high schooler's outfit. And if I was 16, my sister Sari was 12, so they were even less appropriate for her. Baby Mary Eileen was four; maybe they ended up as dress-up clothes for Mary Eileen.

 

But to return to the full circle skirt. The crowning glory of one of those care boxes was a rich brown taffeta double-circle skirt. Can you believe it? It was so full that it was actually two complete circles, shaped to fit smoothly at the waist. Now that was my favourite skirt. It might not have been created with high school in mind (did I really wear it with bobby sox and saddle shoes?), but that never bothered me. This was the era of the full-circle felt poodle skirt, after all; mine seemed to be a more elegant variation of that.

 

I kept the brown taffeta double circle skirt well after I stopped wearing it. It moved all over North America with me, making the cut each time I whittled down (tried to whittle down) my belongings before a coming move. In fact, I still had it when my own girls were in high school, and they loved to wear it. Some things never change: a girl's desire to swish and swirl is one of them.

 

So where is it now? Which daughter made off with it when she left home and then tired of it and let it disappear? (She could after all have returned it to me, no questions asked.) Neither daughter admits to having lost the brown taffeta double circle skirt.

 

It's a shame. But before I weep bitter tears, I'll remind myself that it was a small thing; perhaps I thought I couldn't live without it, but I've managed. I just hope

it ended up with someone who loves it.

 

Copyright 2010 Ann Tudor   

www.anntudor.ca
http://scenesfromthejourney.blogspot.com