When I was a newly engaged 21-year-old, I received an offer from my fiance’s mother. She wanted to know if I would like to wear the family wedding dress. This dress had been made for Michael’s grandmother who was married in 1906. Since then it had been worn by his mother, several of his aunts and his sister. Now, it was being offered to me.

I wore it with pride and joy. It is a magic dress because it seems to fit most body types in a way that makes one feel that it was meant to be. The bodice isn’t fitted, but as the dress drapes, it forms itself to the waist and hips, pooling more or less on the floor, depending on the bride’s height. Made of Brussels lace, the silk underlay has been replaced, but it fit me like a glove and I was able to wear my own grandmother’s lace veil with a pearl-studded pill-box hat that my sister-in-law had worn with the same dress a few years earlier.

My husband and I have had an extraordinarily happy marriage and we always say that the dress is magical because no one who has ever worn it has had a failed marriage.

But I think it was the value system underlying the dress that makes it such a lucky charm. I was a young girl, eager to have the wedding of my dreams, but smart enough to recognize the olive branch that was being handed to me – a gesture that said we are taking you in to be a part of our family for ever and ever.

Twenty-seven years later, my daughter Jane became engaged and of course wanted to wear the dress. Jane looked like an angel on her wedding day. Although she was slimmer and taller than I, it still fit her like it was made for her.

One of my nephews asked for the dress for his bride some years later. I gladly handed it over. Some weeks after the wedding I remembered them coming to our house to deliver the dress back to me, but I had no recollection of actually seeing it. I began to look for it when I was in a closet or down in the basement, wondering where it might be. I was afraid to mention it to my husband so I just quietly went about trying to find it myself. I worried that it had been returned in a green garbage bag and had been thrown out or sent to Goodwill.

My mother-in-law was living with us by this time and I was frantic she would ask me one day where the dress was. Finally, I confronted my husband with the news. I had lost the dress! He was dumbfounded. After thinking for a few minutes, he said he would tell his mother it was his fault. He knew she would forgive him.

That same day, my husband came upstairs from the basement with a file box. He had a funny smirk on his face and I knew he had found the dress. Sure enough, rolled up in a sheet, the dress was safely tucked inside.

What joy and relief I felt knowing the dress was safe. The thread that sews the generations together will continue to hold. My granddaughters will continue to connect the dots linking them to their past when they try on the dress and discover that this wonderful dress was made for them as well as their great-grandmother.

I have another daughter to marry. She has a wonderful guy who will make her very happy and although she hasn’t tried on the dress yet, I know it will fit her just like it was made for her. It’s that kind of dress – it’s magical.

Rosemary Edwards, Toronto, Ont.