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LUCY LOCKET


emita.hill@gmail.com

LUCY LOCKET 

I first posted this in 2019.  Was going to write a new blog for this year but the only changes I'll make are to say that today she would be not 124 but 128. A woman of many parts. Her progeny is numerous and scattered across this nation and onto other continents, all of them interesting men and women with four generations now for whom she would be the great great grandmother.
 
Born in 1895 in Chicago, Lucy was the youngest of four with two older sisters and a brother.

Every summer when I am in Michigan in my cottage on her lake, Long Lake, where her family traveled by train from Chicago before 1900 when she was an infant, my brain floods with memories of Lucy “Locket” Jewett, and of her many passions and predilections and peculiarities, all of which shaped me and my life and that of my four sisters for better or worse.

Like her I was the youngest, and in my case it was by a decade and more, so that she was aging as I grew into my teens. The Cold War and the shadow of Chinese and Russian communism weighed heavily on her.

In her younger days she had loved foreign travel, once taking four little girls (I wasn’t born) to Paris and to Switzerland, a country she always loved.  Later, when those four were off at college or married, she took me to London, Paris, and again to her beloved Switzerland where we stayed in little inns in Zermatt and Innsbruck and Interlochen. She spoke enthusiastically of the One World Federation movement that coincided with the formation of the United Nations. 

 She encouraged me to join Pen Pals and exchange letters with teenagers in France, Turkey, Scotland and Norway, a wonderful experience. One correspondence led to a lifetime two-generation friendship.

Alas, as her fear of communism was fanned by McCarthyism, John Birchers and others—fanatics whose paranoia is surging again today—she backtracked on all of that.  The bumper of her car was adorned with the “Get the US out of the UN” sticker and others of like sentiment.

But today I want to remember and celebrate that younger woman who took her babies to Europe and who taught all of us to ride horseback and swim and canoe and row and fish and turtle and above all to read books and listen to music and enjoy theater and learn languages. 

 Thanks to her we all loved dogs and often raised and trained poodles, and that has continued for three generations.  Thanks to her two of her daughters and one of her granddaughters has also kept horses. Thanks to her the beauty and joy of Long Lake are shared by many of us summer after summer. We come together there as a family from many corners of the globe.

She started it all. Different ones of us succeeded differently, followed different paths, but these were her values and what she tried to transmit.  Thank you, mother.  Thank you, Lucy Locket.  128 years old today.  I salute you and all your progeny.

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