SUFFOLK
Mary Agnes Byrd pulled her TV tray closer.
She reached past the medicine bottles filled with tiny red bows and drop-size black beads for her glue gun. She grabbed two white pompoms the size of cotton balls and sealed them together - a tiny bear body. She glued its bottom to a teeny, plastic blue drum. With her gun, she plopped two smaller black pompoms onto the front; the bear had legs. In seconds, it had black ears. Then black, fluffy arms.
She reached for a bottle of beads and rattled its contents.
"Those are his eyes, but I don't have his nose," she said, "I guess I'll have to make one."
Byrd has been making ornaments for preschoolers for 17 years, always something a little different. One year, her bears were swinging on a raft of crayons for the children at Main Street Day Care & Preschool in Suffolk where Byrd used to work. She's built bears on plastic apples, stuffed them in mittens holding books and on jingle bells.
Years ago, Gin Staylor, the then-director at Main Street, realized Byrd had as much of a touch with crafts as she did with children and asked Byrd to make ornaments as gifts. After Staylor switched jobs, she still called Byrd, even when Byrd left the center to watch her grandbabies at home. This year, she asked Byrd to make 120 bears.
Staylor, who's now the director for the Growing Up At Obici child development center, recently received an e-mail from a former student's family who relocated to Colorado.
The mom wrote about how much they enjoyed the ornaments each year.
Byrd has always liked working with her hands. She sewed many of her own clothes as a teen, then clothes for her daughter's dolls and crafts for church bazaars. She makes enough money from the ornaments to buy her husband of 45 years a Christmas present, she said. Even if no money were involved, Byrd, 67, would probably make the lot, even though her hands are now slower with arthritis.
"I enjoy knowing the kids are going to have them," she said.
She says that what she does isn't much, really. Until she bumps into parents whose children are now in college and they tell her they still hang her ornaments on their trees, and think of her.
Denise Watson Batts, (757) 446-2504 or denise.batts@pilotonline.com
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