I have always been a loser-of-jewelry. The sweet necklace my grandmother gifted me (silver, with a little blue and white porcelain charm of a lighthouse on it) one Christmas. The pearl ring my father bought my mother on a Hawaiian vacation (ouch). The sweet sapphire necklace I bought on a trip to Thailand (so sad). I would hold onto things lovingly and then somehow leave them in an idiotic irretrievable place such as pipes, hotels on another continent, or airport bathrooms. I pretty much stopped buying (or being gifted) jewelry because we all knew it would be lost soon enough.
I hit my 20s and thought myself pretty much cured of the affliction. I held on to Christmas presents, flea-market finds and even some nicer things, too. Then, it started happening. Earrings would fall out of my ears. When I say it was not my fault, I am serious. They literally would just fall out at their own will. At Italian class, a fellow student kindly mentioned one ear was missing a chandelier. After pho one night, DPE asked where the jewel-drop in one ear had gotten to. Reaching up to touch an ear in meetings would find one naked ear. As I left a trail of earrings around town, I became more and more frustrated and jewelry-less.
Then, the artsdevivre hit. No, I did not start wearing one earring instead of two or giving family jewels to panhandlers because I knew I would lose them. Rogue earrings just started popping up. Some may credit it to thorough cleaning but this, I call, great karma. In the basement couch cushions I found this guy’s beautiful partner:
So that was fabulous. Then, later on in the summer, when I was painting our downstairs, I found this gem’s pair in the front-room couch cushions:
Several weeks later, I found yet another. A true coup, as they were teensy AND both had disappeared out of my ears one day. Yet I found one half of the runaways on the bathroom shelf. Buzzing with my newly found earring-finder energy, I held out hope for the other. No such luck that day. But all was not lost. A few days later, I felt something on my foot in my dressing room. I gasped as I bent down to inspect the offending foot pricker. It was the miniature opal’s companion! I could not believe my luck to have happened upon these little guys.
Just like everything else I own, each set of earrings, bracelet or necklace holds some sort of sentimental value or at least reminds me of something: the recovered bejeweled blue and turquoise drops remind me of a friend’s wedding, the blue “sapphire” hoops an afternoon shopping trip with my grandmother and the mini opal of a lazy day in Annapolis with my mother and grandmother. Finding those earrings were bright and unexpected spots in my daily routine. And my ears were certainly the happier for it.
