Dolly Stade b. 1934 d. 2013

Dorothy Louise Fletcher Stade was born December 5, 1934, to Elmer Lee Fletcher and Laura Fletcher, nee Brewster.  Her sister was Nancy Graham.  Her husband of almost fifty-five years was George Gustave Stade.  She had four children -- Bjorn, Eric, Nancy, and Kirsten Stade -- and three grandchildren -- Jack and Nick, and Ursula Ngoc Stade. 

Our mother was profoundly intelligent.  Her intellectual interests were broad and deep, covering nature, medicine, literature, history and politics to name a few.  She was Sir Richard Attenborough in the field, conjuring names of exotic flora from her encyclopedic botanical knowledge, all of it neatly indexed and readily retrieved.  She could pull a quote from literature to illustrate any point she wished to make. How sharper than a serpent's tooth it is to have a thankless child was among her favorites.  She admired the founding fathers, perhaps as much for their interest in gardening as for their contributions to history.  Not surprisingly, she was a Mensa member.  I often thought I'd like to be as smart as she was.  In truth, it was probably a liability.  With those chops the times you live in must always seem insipid.   

Maybe that is why she was so funny, because humor could palliate the imbecilism to which she was so finely attuned.  Her sense of humor ranged from silly to Swiftian and encompassed everything in between.  When we gathered her house plants to donate to neighbors we came across an Afro pick with a Black Power fist stuck into the soil of a philodendron.  That combination of irony (what's a fine haired girl with New England ancestry dating to around the Mayflower doing with an Afro pick) and sincerity (because she was a free thinker, and had deep sympathy for the civil rights movement, having declined membership in the Daughters of the American Revolution because of their history of refusing to have Black performers at their concert hall) was pretty typical.  She had a special gift for the caustic.  Driving past the Takoma Park Republican Voters Garden -- a few rangy azaleas on a corner lot -- provoked one of her scornful rhetoricisms: What do you think they plant there, stink weed?  It was with utmost affection that she called her children nitwits and other more obscure terms of similar connotation from the mysterious lexicon she wielded.

More than anything else she gave.  To her husband and children, to a long list of charities.  She gave in her endless nurturing of flowers and plants, in her love of animals and nature, in the ornaments and mosaics she made, in the ink sketches of owls.  The night of her death we brought some of our mother's boxes down from the closet and unpacked two handmade cloth dolls she made for her daughters years ago. They had hand-embroidered fur-lined cloaks that could be removed to reveal elaborate skirts made from our childhood dresses, petticoats, and underneath stockings and boots she'd made from old ribbons. She was constantly sending off notes to her children and grandchildren, penned in her beautiful hand, and decorated with sketches of her beloved dog Dizzy or folkloric hearts and flowers.  The work I most associate with her is a mosaic made from the glass tiles she purchased perhaps fifty years ago, from an antique store in the Village when she and my father were living on Jane Street.  The mosaic is of a blue eyed woman with her arms wrapped around two children, one fair-haired and one with dark hair.  An art critic from the day had the audacity to review her tile work somewhat derisively, titling his piece Artsy Craftsy Betsey Stade.  He couldn't appreciate the absence of irony in her handiwork.  The things she made with her hands came from a place of pure love.

She was less interested in receiving, and though we struggled with it one had to admire her determination.  She became more and more obstinate that she'd live and die just as she chose.  I am glad that in the last few decades of her life she visited her children wherever we were - all over the Southwest, Northern California, Colorado, Counties Sligo, Dublin, and Donegal, Central Mexico - but her first choice was always the cabin set on seventy woody Adirondack acres our parents purchased in 1970 and visited every summer for the next 43 years.  Following my father's retirement, their summer vacations ran from May to October, until 2012, when even Dolly acknowledged the care and maintenance might be more than they could continue.  Towards the end she did accept a gift from my sister, who went with my parents to spend a few days in early July in the old home on the Benson - Bleecker road.  I am grateful she had those days.

The family is holding a private service at Francis Collins Funeral Home and Rock Creek Cemetery, where her ashes will be interred.  If you would like to honor Dolly, you may do so by making a donation to the Washington Humane Society in her name, or by posting your memory of Dolly as a comment to this blog.