Good Deed Indeed!

Choose to Connect…a mantra I try to follow daily. It’s a theme that recurs in my writing as well. And often these musings conclude with happy endings. So I’ll add another to the pile because good news seems thin these days. We need more of it.

In our deep-dive time traveling with my grandmother’s letters (dating back to the late 1800’s), my research partner, Betsy, and I became enamored with a photograph of my grandmother perched on a wall with seven of her ‘besties’ at the women’s college Sweet Briar in 1921. We call the photo the Sweet Briar Girls. They straddle the wall with their skirts hiked up, exposing their rolled stockings and (clutch your pearls!) their KNEES without a care in the world. We’ve spent hours identifying the girls and contacting some of their descendants with the grand hope of a meeting at the wall in honor of these bold young women. (That journey of discovery and connection merits its own telling and is in the queue.) Fortunately, my grandmother’s closest friend Shiney had a son Frankie, who is 89 years-old, and was enthusiastically ‘all in’. We immediately planned a weekend visit that worked with his schedule and contacted Sweet Briar.

Sweet Briar College, located outside Lynchburg, Virginia, is stunningly situated on two thousand-plus acres of rolling hills and centuries-old deciduous forests with an iconic campus of renowned historic architecture. The plantation was donated by the parents of a young girl Daisy, noted harpist and artist who tragically died at the age of 16 in 1884. The women’s college was created in 1901 in her memory and continues today under the auspices of that original decree.

We first perused the Sweet Briar Museum (located in the old Campus Inn converted to the Alumni House) which offered us detailed glimpses of what surrounded the girls in the 1920’s, and then were generously allowed access to explore the College Archives. After hours of pouring through yearbooks, scrapbooks (quite the activity of the day) and boxes of old photographs we realized we had absorbed up to our very limit every 1920’s detail offered to us and that we were famished.

Enter the good deed! As we left the archives in search of Daisy’s Café, we crossed paths with a student who noticed our unsureness and offered us assistance. She happily offered to lead us to Daisy’s and while walking we started a conversation that ended up continuing throughout our visit to the Café. Her name is Rachel, and she was a graduating senior with a double major in Creative Writing and Music Education. And she chose to connect. We listened to her description of life as a current Sweet Briar student, and we informed her of the traditions dating back to the 1920’s. We were astonished to find Sweet Briar’s rituals and traditions continue to be steeped and deeply-rooted. (Although the spectacular pageant of selecting a May Queen And Court, fully regaled in flowing gowns and head-to-toe floral arrangements, did not make it through the birth of feminism in the 1960’s, a Sweet Briar girl still wears her college ring on her left hand if she is not married and switches to the right hand when she ‘crosses over’).

As we finished our snack, Rachel informed us while looking at our photo of The Sweet Briar Girls, that she could lead us to the wall! And off we went to a surprisingly high bridge that connects the top stories of two original dormitories. We were shocked at how cavalier the girls seem in the picture, as Betsy and I gingerly tried to recreate the pose without vertigo setting in. Those girls were something! Steely women actually… after just experiencing the ravages of both the 1918 Spanish Flu and World War I, they were fearless on that wall. We left Rachel that afternoon with her contact info and her offer to assist us the next day during our planned visit with Frankie.

Unfortunately, that plan went awry when we learned that Frankie had contracted Covid. He was well enough to meet us virtually thankfully, so we met Rachel once more and she delivered us back to the wall. We all shared a very poignant moment thinking of the friendships formed before us and celebrating the new ones established…all from a moment captured in time. Rachel that day was wearing jeans that were signed like a yearbook. She mentioned she chose those instead of having a Sweet Briar ring for her college keepsake. She then deposited us back to the Alumni House and we bid adieu to our Sweet Briar visit.

As Betsy and I reflected on the weekend, we both agreed that Rachel was an unexpected bonus to our journey and decided to honor her generosity by offering her a Sweet Briar ring as a thank you. The Alumni House hosts a Fancy Hat Lunch for graduating seniors. That afternoon, they pulled Rachel aside from the lunch and we face-timed together. I informed her from a writer-to-writer viewpoint, my obsession with connection. And that she practiced connection in spades. I told her that I would send her a copy of each of my books and she was thrilled. And then I mentioned to her that it was evident how deeply connected she was to Sweet Briar and that we were concerned her jeans might wear out someday, so we were giving her a Sweet Briar ring as a more permanent keepsake. Perhaps a tear or two was shed with big smiles all around. The next step for Rachel was to go to the bookstore to have her finger sized and to choose an inscription. And this is what we learned later…. Rachel inscribed her ring A&B, ’22. Anne and Betsy are now etched into Sweet Briar’s fabric. It’s amazing how paths can change in an instant if we choose to merge in life instead of repell each other. Stay tuned… The journey with The Letters continues.