THE DRESDEN ANGEL
"...she was part of a trio. Dee Dee —along with her older sisters, Katie and Margy—was part of a trio too."
When my grandmother Dee Dee died in 2004, and my mother, aunt and I sorted through all she left behind, I was 42 years old, with two young children—not in a place to display delicate things. Yet I claimed this little porcelain angel playing a lute, bone-white except for blue lettering on her underside: “Germany, Dresden.” Looking back, I recall that she was part of a trio. Dee Dee —along with her older sisters, Katie and Margy—was part of a trio too.
I was Dee Dee’s first grandchild, born on her 51st birthday, and during my first year, I lived with her in that house that my grandfather and his brothers had built from a Sears kit in the early 1930s. She was in her twenties when they married. After their wedding, she folded away bits of herself to fit into a house of in-laws.
When I came along (adding to a household that already included my grandfather, her mother-in-law and three teen children), she tended to me during the day so my mother could finish her student teaching and college degree. As I grew, Dee Dee cinched our early binding by teaching me to crochet, make chocolate confections, win nickels at the card game Scat, save money in a Christmas Club account, pray the rosary and write loving letters secured with sealing wax.
Margy never had children, but in her bed—in a quieter house under the shadow of an onion-dome steeple, in the same once-thriving Pennsylvania coal town—is where Dee Dee had given birth to my mother. When she was old and had lost her mind to age, Margy would cry out to Dee Dee, “Why did you steal my baby?!” I suppose that made me her stolen grandbaby. I’m the one she taught to whistle to birds in her flower-filled yard, to decorate cakes with colored marshmallows snipped into flower petals. I’m the one who named my daughter Margaret after her.
Katie’s first husband died in a mine collapse in 1932, after which she became the town postmaster (a job she held for nearly 30 years), raised their son, remarried and made a new home around the corner from Dee Dee’s house. Well into her 90s, she kept her fingernails perfectly shaped and painted the color of pomegranates, and wore a dress and pantyhose every day, even on bowling days. Eventually, though, neither she nor Margy could care for themselves or keep up their homes. When they reached that point, they moved in with Dee Dee.
And when they moved in, some of their stuff moved with them. Perhaps some of that stuff included the angels. I don’t remember them in Dee Dee’s house when I was growing up. Who owned them first? And where did they come from? Maybe they’d lived in Margy’s big curio cabinets? Or someone had given them to Katie because they were slender and tiny like she was? Were they souvenirs brought back by someone who’d visited Germany? I’m certain that none of the three sisters ever went there. None of them ever traveled anywhere outside the country.
The full Dresden angel collection is a large and varied heavenly band—a great joyous assortment, all female, playing horn, harp, cello, tambourine, cymbals, violin. Mine perches on a shelf in my office, wavy hair pulled back, hem of her long dress swaying, one foot emerging from beneath the dress as if ready to dance, right hand raised, gracefully preparing to pluck the lute’s strings. Somewhere along the way, one of her wings got clipped. I keep it beside her and have never been tempted to glue it back on. It's a reminder—to me, and everyone who looks at her—that we can make music even when we've lost parts of ourselves.
—Alison Condie Jaenicke
Alison Condie Jaenicke teaches writing, and serves as assistant director of creative writing, at Penn State University.