Her last birthday was spent at Borders on Zeier Road.  “Tell me a story,”  you said.

She described one of her earliest jobs, working at the hat counter, selling sprays of flowers and net to decorate blank hat forms.

As she painted the picture – bins brimming with bouquets and fruit and birds, ladies who simply couldn’t pass up a few pennies worth of millinery confections – enchanting us all, it seemed she had us eating from the palm of her hand.

But really, dear friend, she was eating from yours.

Thank you from the bottom of my heart for the joy it gave her to give the gift of that story, on her very own day, so many years later.

It is among my most precious possessions.