Valerie Fletcher Eliot, born this day in 1926
Today would be Valerie Fletcher Eliot’s 90th birthday. I’ve been thinking about the reserved girl whose schoolmates I’ve visited in different parts of England over the past two years. I have met wonderful old ladies whose energy and vivacity gives me hope for my own future decades. None knew Valerie well. She was that quiet girl in the back of the picture, shadowy in memory and only memorable now because of her marriage to a famous poet in 1957. In this school photo, which I found in an album kept [...]