Filene's

Suzy sent a hundred dollars
with which to buy the items on the list they sent from the school where I was sent to escape her sister.

To be plucked from the ever increasing velocity of her maelstrom to land on the solid granite of Vermont's most ancient guardian mountains was the gift of salvation, a chance for sanity.
Sanctuary.
Until it wasn't.

Betsy, the youngest of the three sisters only six years my senior and also my other aunt,
who lived in Boston in 1969 with her lover Tim - their apartment
so close to Fenway that they could hear the fans cheering wildly
if the wind was blowing in the right direction-
took me to Filene's Basement where we swept through the bins of
seconds and thirds and bought me my first ever set of sheets.
They were avocado green and floral and polyester. My father and his wife had the same pattern on the bed in their guest room. I reckon they are there still.
We bought a lime green cardboard footlocker to carry my new belongings- and I kept that footlocker through that school and the next and through college. For many years to follow everything that I owned could be stuffed into that ugly green thing.

I never did have all of the things in that long list. I also never had the lace up boots that I coveted or warm mittens-until the ones that Rebecca knit for me (and thus instilling in me a life long love of knitting ) - or new underwear from elitist department stores, like the other denizens of the boarding schools where I more or less attended, but I was damn proud of that set of new sheets, and the purple towels that I would hang on my cement dorm room walls just to have a splash of color.
And I will always recall fondly that day in Filene's Basement when Betsy and I pawed through the bins in Filene's basement gleefully spending Suzy's hundred dollars.