As I walked down the stairs of my tiny house today, a bracelet which I wear every day slipped from my wrist and clattered onto the floor. I stooped to retrieve it and realized that I have a knack for losing jewelry.
My mother gave me her high school identification bracelet. I kept it in my jewelry box for many years. Every once in a while, I would touch its brass-colored surface and trace the name etched on the disk: Cillekin, the dimunitive of her name, Lucille. Dear little Lucy. She told me that her Austrian grandmother had given her the nickname. I started wearing her bracelet during my son’s childhood. I thought of her. I often yearned for my mother’s calm advice to waylay many of the mistakes that I seemed destined to make. I would gaze at the bracelet and wonder, What would Lucy do, or her mother Johanna, or her grandmother Bibiana? How would they handle the challenges of single-motherhood, of a blended family, of divorce and challenging illnesses?
That bracelet slipped from my thin wrist at the Kansas City Airport on the day I put my son on a plane for six weeks as an exchange student in Mexico.
A few years later, I found a sterling silver Italian bracelet at a flea market somewhere between Kansas City and St. Louis. I spied it through the glass case and instantly recognized it as something special. I willingly paid $10.00 and later found it valued at closer to $200.00. I wore that until it, too, slipped from my arm — this time, while I frantically bagged trash just after dawn as the sanitation truck lumbered down my street.
I bought my Kansas City house in 1992 from a couple whose children attended the same daycare as my son. The architect husband left his practice to become a minister. When we moved into our new home, I found a bracelet trapped between two floorboards. I called the wife and described it. She couldn’t think to whom it might belong. I kept it. Periodically, I tried to find its owner.
When my bracelet fell off tonight, I remembered that little gold circle. I got it out and studied its charms. A nurse who got her pin in 1948; probably with a child born in 1957; who owned a poodle named Baron. Oh Jeanne’s mama, where can you be? I thought of my own mother’s bracelet, long since swept into an airport dustbin; of that little string of silver flowers crunched at the landfill. I let the delicate chain fall from hand to hand. Is she still alive? Does she wonder what became of her nurse’s pin? Baron must have meant so much to her, that she would have a pearl embedded in the charm she picked to honor him.
The videos on minimalism which I tend to play during breakfast caution that we should ask ourselves whether particular items serve a purpose in our lives, right now, in this moment. If the answer is not a clear “yes”, one teacher instructs, then it must be a “no” and the item must go. I shake my head and gently tuck the golden bracelet back into a little cubby in my jewelry box. Perhaps this item serves no purpose to me, right now; but I’m not quite ready to abandon my quest to reunite it with its rightful owner. My mother would not want me to let it go just yet.
It’s the twenty-eighth day of the ninety-fourth month of My Year Without Complaining. Life continues.
