It wasn’t until my senior year of college that I discovered the works of Virginia Woolf. A few years later, I had the good fortune to hear Angelica Bell Garnett talk at the Metropolitan Museum in New York about her childhood in the Bloomsbury Circle. There was something that resonated with me about her talk. I couldn’t put my finger on it and chocked it up to my fascination with their group.

Yesterday, it became clearer to me. I grew up in a similar circle. No, the Lull’s, Hynes’, Kelly’s, Lamont’s, Johanson’s, Seeley’s, Hatton’s and others were not famous painters, poets, philosophers and novelists the way the Bell’s, Woolf’s, Forester’s and others were, yet there was a lot in common.

Yesterday, remnants of the sewing circle gathered to remember a recently deceased matron of the group, Evelyn Lull. My childhood perceptions of the group are perhaps even less clear than Angelica’s perception of the group she grew up in, so these are my own recollections which may, or may not, relate all that closely to the facts of The Sewing Circle.

In the early sixties, my family and other families moved to Williamstown, MA. The men were engineers, coming to work at Sprague Electric. Sprague was a large capacitor manufacture that made components for industry, the military and NASA. The families of these men became a close knit group, The Sewing Circle. I don’t know how much The Sewing Circle was families whose patriarchs were engineers at Sprague, how much it was of mothers that knew each other from the parent teacher association, friends from church, from Scouting, or other circles. I know that my closest friends of my childhood came from this circle, and I went to school, scouting and church with these friends.

We would gather on summer evenings at one families’ house or another. Mothers would take care of the children of other mothers in the circle. Every so often, the mothers would gather for ‘Sewing Circle’. I remember these days fondly, not so much because of the prospect of being left home with older siblings or a babysitter, but because my mother would bake something special for the ‘Sewing Circle’ and bake an extra goodie for us as well. Tea rings were my favorite.

A couple years ago, Bill Seeley died. Bill was one of the fathers in this circle that had left Sprague to teach in local schools or colleges. Other’s had done the same thing, and these families seemed to survive the best. My father, Evelyn Lull’s husband, and others, stayed at Sprague until things got much worse.

It was America in the late sixties and early seventies. The country was at war. There was turmoil at home. Arts, feminism and pacifism were themes reshaping our society. Friendships were torn by this. Sprague was hit by a strike. Many families were torn apart, especially those of the men that stayed at Sprague.

I don’t know whatever happened between Roger and Evelyn Lull. As best as I can tell, Roger ended up with mental health problems, lost his job at Sprague and got a divorce. We kept going over to the Lull’s house out in the hopper. It was an old farm house by a creek, another one of those idyllic settings where we chased fireflies in the early summer evenings after having played in the hayloft, swum in the stream or jumped on an outdoors trampoline.

Evelyn, like my mother, and many of the other mothers in the sewing circle participated in the fine arts. Besides the fiber arts of knitting and crochet at The Sewing Circle gatherings, they painted, sculpted, and found other ways of expressing themselves artistically. As their families fell apart, they stuck together and supported one another. Evelyn was a special source of strength to many.

At the memorial, Evelyn’s brother-in-law, Mack, spoke of her as an important link in a long line of strong women. In the eighteen hundreds, Ida Stapleton sought to enter divinity school. Her husband was a missionary in Turkey, and she wanted to serve as well. She was denied so she became a medical doctor. Robert and Ida served in Ezroom Turkey during the Armenian genocide. Mack spoke about the strong woman that Ida’s daughter became, and then about Ida’s granddaughter Evelyn.

There were other stories told at the memorial. Stories about eating freshly caught fish for breakfast, alongside blueberry pancakes. People talked about what a great cook Evelyn was, a job she ended up doing professionally at Williams College after her divorce. There were stories about how Evelyn always spoke to everyone as an equal and how this had strongly struck so many children who had always felt talked down to by others. People talked about being taught to paint by Evelyn.

Vanessa Bell’s daughter, Angelica Bell Garnett was born on Christmas Day towards the end of World War I. Evelyn Lull’s daughter, Daphne was also born on Christmas Day, during the cold war. She is now an artist living in Italy. I don’t know if she read E. M. Forster’s Italian novels, but in my mind it is yet another parallel between The Bloomsbury Circle and The Sewing Circle.

Evelyn’s son Cliff now lives in a bucolic setting that echoes my childhood memories out in the hopper. There is a creek on the property that has been dammed up for swimming, a garden, and a house that has received a lot of work.

I also wonder how much I have passed on from Evelyn and The Sewing Circle to my children. The sense of talking to children as peers instead of down to them is something I always carried with me. I’ve taken flack from others for this, but I believe my children have grown up more expressive and better off for this.

At the memorial, a person commented that they always wanted to have their memorial service before they died. They were such interesting times and powerful chances to reconnect with one another. There is something to this. Too often, I’ve been to funerals where people talk about how they haven’t seen one another since the last funeral and they should get together in happier times. At one point, when Fiona was younger, we headed off to a family reunion, and when we explained this to her, she asked, “Who died?”

We need more chances to remember what is important about our families and social circles. We need reunions and celebrations and birthdays and anniversaries. We need the arts to remind us of beauty and things that matter.

And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow,
Dropping from the veils of the morning to where the cricket sings;
There midnight's all a glimmer, and noon a purple glow,
And evening full of the linnet's wings.

Rest In Peace, Evelyn Lull.