A museum can be a strange place. Sometimes what at first appears quite mundane can turn out to be a far more interesting artifact than you might expect. You might look at something in a museum and think it is not nearly as impressive as the other things on display, but then you learn one little fact about it that makes it worlds more interesting. Something like this has happened to me recently, and it involves a woman named Mary.
![Here we see a letter written in cursive handwriting signed by Mary.](https://sites.psu.edu/frost/wp-content/uploads/sites/1920/2015/08/20355930919_2e03975b981.jpg)
The day started like any other; I was moving dragonfly specimens into their new storage shelves, and had been at it for a while. I pried open a new, nondescript brown box filled with old dead dragonflies. Nothing struck me about these particular specimens at first; they were not remarkably large or brightly colored, nor were they seemingly very exotic. Just perfectly ordinary dragonflies.
![Here we see two Odanata collected in 1935.](https://sites.psu.edu/frost/wp-content/uploads/sites/1920/2015/08/Old-Odanata.jpg)
About halfway through putting them into new storage, I found a worn piece of paper wedged between the brown triangles that held the specimens. This in and of itself was not unusual; oftentimes researchers and collectors put little notes in the boxes with data on them, things like the date or species found. But this one was a letter from a woman named Mary. It was short, and I read through it in a few seconds, but those few seconds warped my whole perspective on the contents of the box.
The letter was undated, but found among specimens dated from 1928, addressed to “George and Alice.” The wounds from the Great War were starting to heal after a decade of peace and rebuilding, the Great Depression was not even a shadow of a thought, Fitzgerald’s famous book had exploded in popularity; the Jazz Age was truly in full swing. Somewhere out there was Mary, trading through fields collecting dragonflies.
Who is Mary? I don’t know. What I can say is that her letter is written with such a casual manner that I have assumed she is a close relative of either George or Alice. She describes how she caught a cold, and the weather became chilly and frosty due to a storm. She says “I tried my best to get some dragonflys (sic) for you but this is the best I could do,” and the letter is signed affectionately “With Love, Mary.”
I imagine Mary as a mother, trying her best to help her son George get his insect collection going. I have no basis for this other than the tone of the letter; small things like telling George to be careful in the cold weather so as not to catch a cold, and the kind signature at the end. I imagine a small woman, sitting in the peaceful time when the War was over and the Depression had yet to sink its bite, walking around the in fields in the evening with a big net, trying her best to help her son or daughter’s bug collection take off. Again for all I know, this letter could be from a different time period. Mary could be a sister or colleague or close friend, and maybe where she was there were no fields, but it even so it paints these small dragonflies in a whole new light.
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