I unwrapped that old dress-shop ribbon right there in my bedroom, and I had to sit down, because inside was a photograph and a folded note, and the photograph was of me at eighteen in my wedding gown, standing in that very mirror while my mother cried.
The seamstress who owned that dress shop for forty-seven years, a woman named Vera, had left the note. From her fitting room she had dressed this whole town, every bride, every prom girl, every mother of the groom, for near half a century.
I never knew a photograph of me in my wedding dress had been taken in that shop. My own family did not own a camera fine enough. But Vera kept one behind the counter, and on the day a girl stood in that three-way mirror in the gown she would marry in, if it was a girl she had watched grow up, Vera quietly took her picture.
For forty-seven years Vera photographed the brides of this town in the moment they first saw themselves in their wedding gowns, and she hid each picture in the hollow of the mirror frame where the girl had stood, so that the mirror that showed a bride her future would forever hold the memory of it.
Her note said a dressmaker sees a woman on the most hopeful day of her life, and that after forty-seven years of it, she could not bear for all those hopeful faces to vanish when the shop closed. She wrote that I had stood in that mirror in 1958 in the gown I married my Thomas in, and my mother had wept, and Vera had caught all of it, and that if the mirror ever came home to me, I should have that morning back.
Thomas and I had forty-five years. I had forgotten my mothers face that day until I saw it again in that photograph, crying with joy behind her eighteen year old daughter.
My mother is long gone. My Thomas too. But there they both are, in a picture I never knew existed, on the happiest morning of my young life.
I have it framed on my dresser now, beside the mirror. And I have gone looking for the other brides whose pictures Vera hid, the ones still living. I found a woman of eighty who wept to see herself in her wedding dress at nineteen, a picture she never knew was taken.
I bought back the old dress-shop mirror because a panel was loose. It held the wedding morning of half the brides in this town, kept by a seamstress who thought the most hopeful day of a womans life was worth saving, and I have been the one blessed to carry those mornings home.