OPINION: Born to fly upward

But her physical delicacy and fragility belied a tremendous strength. Recruited out of college by the CIA, she worked as “a spook” (that expression made her laugh, too) in Washington, DC for her entire career, and met and married a man who hailed from Commerce, which is how we were lucky enough to have her here. Widowed young, she devoted her retirement to the service and enjoyment of her community, her church, her friends, and her garden. (She was a credentialed master gardener.)

She served on the Downtown Development Authority board, was in the Study Club, the Pine Tree Garden Club, and the Commerce Friends of the Library, and was a children’s advocate for C.A.S.A. and an elder in the Presbyterian church. She loved a good joke, and she gave the best advice there was. And when she surprised us all by dying last Saturday evening after a long illness, one of our mutual friends said, “Elaine must have stopped by to pick her up!” Because Elaine Harber — another out-of-towner who married a Commerce man and proceeded to make herself all but indispensable here — had died just the day before.

A native of Rome, Georgia, where her father was the headmaster of the Darlington School, Elaine might as well have been from Paris as far as I was concerned. When she showed up here on the arm of pharmacist Sonny Harber, I thought she was the most glamorous woman I’d ever seen, and I understood that she was a true intellectual. It was characteristic of her that this brought whoops of laughter when I told her about it years later. But then — and like her friend Mary Frances — she thought a lot of things were funny, while also cultivating a deeply serious side. Her grandson was probably speaking for all of us when he said, “I always feel better when I’m around her.”

Elaine was in the Study Club, was a staunch supporter of the library’s Summer Reading Program every year, and not only kept our beloved local drugstore, Commerce Drugs, open after her husband died, but redecorated it, updated it, and found a buyer for it who promised to keep its traditions going.

“O human race,” Dante wrote, “born to fly upward . . . ” He must have had Elaine and Mary Frances in mind. I like to think that Elaine did indeed stop by to pick up her friend, and now they’re flying upward, on their way to meet Sonny and Tom, talking a mile a minute and laughing all the way.

Susan Harper is retired, lives in Commerce and volunteers with the Commerce Public Library and the Jackson County Literacy Program.