Of Lockets and Old Ladies

Granny Fitzpatrick gasped as the falling star blazed through the evening sky. Her face grew hard, then tender, as she announced, “My boys are comin’ home from the war soon, and I’ll be alive to see it, though not long after.”

I wasn’t on the front porch that night. But I’m sure that whatever relations were rocking and enjoying the coolness of the mountain evening air with Granny Fitzpatrick accepted without doubt her portents of the omen in the sky. These are just the sort of things that happened in our family. At least it did to those who held the heart locket.

According to my mother, her Granny Fitzpatrick was known not only for the gift of foresight, but also claimed the locket had the power to stop a charging dog in its tracks. Why my great-grandmother was known by her last name and not first is still a mystery to me, but one thing is certain—wild dogs and other animals were clearly something of a menace in the Shenandoah at that time. My childish imagination magnified the danger tenfold, and then came the Last Plague, and it all seemed like child’s play.

When I was young, I soaked up these family tales like a baby's bib on spit-up spaghetti sauce, but as I grew older my confidence in them waned and after the death of my mother…I set them aside completely.

There was a time when I was certain that the locket conferred upon its bearer, particularly as she approached an old lady status, a measure of wisdom and secret knowledge. Like my Aunt Daisy (great Aunt Daisy to be exact) who lived to be 102. While her outside grew crumpled and withered her inner life seemed to ascend into a lofty place where bits of tested lore and ancient truths gathered into an impenetrable fortress.

It was Aunt Daisy that gave me the locket, which amuses me because I was only two when she gave it to me. Aunt Daisy was Granny Fitzpatrick’s younger sister. She also enjoyed numerous fantastic experiences with the locket and was a favorite Aunt of my mother. This is how my mother came to be involved, which was only right.

When all the forgettable gifts of my sixteenth birthday were opened Mom mysteriously took me aside, away from everyone else and said, “There’s one more thing for you. It’s from your great Aunt Daisy.”

Although I was just two fresh years old when Aunt Daisy died, I do remember her. She was hunched over and sat quietly in a wheelchair at the old folks’ home. She didn’t smell bad like a lot of elderly folks do. She wore a scent of roses and held me tenderly with her strong hands of paper-thin skin, like I was the most precious gift she could imagine. But what I remember most were her eyes. While her face, hands and clothes appeared crinkled and worn, her eyes sparkled clear and smiled in a big but secret way like she knew something privately amusing and you felt that any minute now if you were incredibly lucky, she might reveal some huge surprise.

I was sixteen when I first discovered that patient, disciplined humor that mostly old ladies seem to possess. Mother handed me the heart-shaped locket. It wasn’t wrapped and there was no note with it. Delicate etchings of a floral motif graced the front—sort of like a yin and yang with a wavy line to separate the symmetrical pattern. It was made of a white gold which was worn smooth with age. There was a chain which was decrepit and of poor quality through a top loop—a curious gift from a strange old woman long gone to me.

“Open it,” Mother said.

“What?”

“It opens. It’s a locket.”

“Oh…”

And of course, a locket does open. On this one you place a thumb nail on the right side between a thin division and it easily swings the top portion upward. Normally there are pictures of two people inside, perhaps a young lady and her young beau. This had a single black and white photo set into the right side.

It’s quite faded now. You can barely make out that it’s a head shot of a thin person—you can’t really tell male or female. The person is standing in a front or back yard, for there appears to be a grassy area in the background with tall hedges and the outline of branches framing the head.

It’s Aunt Daisy, I know. When I first received the locket, the image was not quite so faded. She was young and smiling. Now the photo is curling up around the bottom rim of the locket and I wonder about the hands that cut out the uneven oval and placed it snugly into the hold of the locket for such a time when a young girl would come to remember, and perhaps cherish, the thought of the former owner. Why me?

I miss my mother. It’s amazing how that simple confession, over ten years after her passing, still brings wells of tears into my eyes. She was a lovely woman that bore extraordinary gifts as if they were only natural, like her Granny Fitzpatrick and Aunt Daisy before her. Mother claimed that after she received the locket from Aunt Daisy, she had prophetic dreams and unusual promptings.

She was a doctor, my mother. She’d grown interested in the craft from Granny Fitzpatrick’s ministrations with herbs and other folksy remedies. She loved telling me the old family stories and reading me fantasy and science fiction stories too. Her real gift was her touch, though. Her fingers soothed my troubled forehead many a time. Her patients adored her. And sometimes…well, she did too much. During the Last Plague, the one just three years after the COVID pandemic, she touched a dying patient, without gloves, out of love. She said she had to. Why?

I thought the locket was a spooky thing to wish on someone. I recall rummaging out the photo of Aunt Daisy and exploring all around inside for any additional secrets. I never found anything extraordinary about it and I returned the photo to the right side of the locket.

Unlike many women I once relished the thought of growing old. Learning early that wrinkles and gray hair are not something to be ashamed of could be a factor. They prove that one has attained the mystic wisdom of old lady-tude and therefore one has earned special allowances. Old ladies can fall asleep at meetings and people may smile and nudge one another but nobody thinks the less of them. They can wear baggy hose with sandals or no hose at all with the dress they wore to their high school graduation sixty years ago and that’s okay too.

My mom hadn’t reached this level of automatic forgiveness for baggy leggings and poor fashion choice in footwear—she wasn’t yet old—just sixty-four and still quite beautiful. But she lay wasting away in the hospital. They let me speak to her through video link. The woman was dying, and soon.

“Do you have the locket?”

“Yes,” I say, unclenching my hand.

“Open it.”

I pry it open. Oddly, now there is no longer just the one photo of Aunt Daisy on the right side, but on the left side is the black and white head shot of a young girl that I can’t place. She looks familiar. Ah, she’s about eighteen years old.

“It’s you,” I say, looking from the photo to her profile even now, a truly graceful, feminine face, but strong and determined as well. “How?”

She smiles and says, “Make sure you pass this on to your own daughter someday.”

“But Mom,” I start to say I have no daughter, no children at all, but find it impossible to refuse the dying wish and say, “sure…of course I will.”

“Good, good, and you must tell her…about Granny Fitzpatrick and Aunt Daisy. You will, won’t you?”

“Of course…and about you too,” I say, and can’t contain my tears any longer.

“Stop, no, you mustn’t cry now…shhh. I’m not going anywhere.”

But she did go. Even though I squeezed that locket all night and begged whatever magic it held to cure my mother of that terrible disease, she still went. She died and my belief in the family heirloom died with her. She, like millions of other moms, had departed way too soon. All I have left of her now is the locket and a science fiction short story collection, two things she cherished but did her no good in the end.

But they are foremost in my mind today as I cradle the little girl in my arms, just three momentous days old. We share the fact that our mothers are gone. Her birth mother, my neighbor, died two days ago. That’s how this disease works…it’ll snatch mothers that way. It robbed me of mine. Our little community of cabins among the orchards, is almost devoid of female tenderness. It’s a sad place, where we try to carry on.

I fervently wish that I had Mom’s counsel, her calm. What is the point of life, if giving birth is a death sentence? Any path this child takes will be difficult—will she choose to have a child, or to live a long, difficult life? I place the sleeping baby in the crib and tiptoe to my jewelry box. I grasp the locket. A voice in my head says, “Open it.” I do. Here’s the curled image of Aunt Daisy on one side and my mother on the other…and for the first time I notice there’s something underneath the image of Mom.

What? I carefully lift the photo and spy a tiny slip of yellowing paper underneath. I’m certain it wasn’t there before. Written in faded blue ink is, “Heinlein.”

What sort of code is this—clearly it had some special meaning to someone and I…

I need the story collection. I scan the room and walk toward the bookcase. My eyes light upon the anthology, it’s dusty cover belying its significance to me. I brush it off and watch clumps of matted dirt float accusingly to the floor.

I ignore them, gather my courage, and open the book. Inside are Mom’s initials scribbled in the same faded blue ink. The contents are just as I left them—scraps of newspaper clippings on promising new cures for the Last Plague are jammed between pages.

I carefully negotiate these glimpses into her life and leaf to the section on Robert Heinlein. There’s a torn page from an article interviewing the author. One passage is underlined in faded blue ink. It’s a quote that reads, “Do not handicap your children by making their lives easy.” And then I know…we have shared this bittersweet moment.

Someday, maybe when my daughter is sixteen, I will relate this bit of family history with her. Yes, I will tell her the legend of the locket. She will receive an inheritance that is as unique as the women in her family before her. I’m not sure what her future holds, but it’s hers to live.

She’ll learn about Granny Fitzpatrick’s powers over animals, about the kind but mysterious Aunt Daisy, and I’ll tell her about my mother and hers…how they died too young.

And I will tell her this—I don’t know the answer to whether this locket has some power that facilitates supernatural talents, but I do know one thing for certain. It connects us to one another—generation to generation. It is, in fact, like an old lady, like the women of our family, a haven of surprises and secret charm, and a special kind of enduring joy buried beneath a deceptive outer shell. You have only to open it to find the incredible treasure hidden within.