Precious things

My mother loved jewelry. She loved to go into shops, look in the glass cases, try things on. Once she said she was going to buy some stones and start designing her own pieces.

Her taste was so different from mine. I like very simple and small things, she liked things you could see from another zip code. But it didn't stop her from buying me (and my sister) all sorts of necklaces, bracelets, rings, and earrings. Most people would never know about this, because I tend to wear the same couple of pieces all the time.

For example, there's one necklace I wear more often than any of the others. It's a small gold chain with a small gold letter "D." The charm was something that someone got for me when I was a very little girl. I think it was because someone had bought my sister something with her name on it, and got me the "D" as a way of making it up to me that we could never, ever find anything in any store with my name on it. I was so young at the time that I don't really know who got it for me -- whether it was my mother or one of my grandmothers or even someone else. What I do know is that it's something I cherish.

I also have one bracelet that I wear pretty much every day -- a very thin gold bracelet with hearts. My mother bought me this bracelet when I was 20 or 21, for Hanukkah. It actually was the first bracelet she got in what became a series of birthday/holiday bracelets, one each year for five or six years. It got to the point that I would make jokes about the "annual bracelet."

Because of the link pattern and the fact that it's very small and dainty, the bracelet is one of my favorite things, and I've worn it pretty much every day since I got it. I pretty much don't take it off, and it's so small that I often forget it's there. I forgot to take it off when I made my mosaic tables that are now plant stands, so there was tile grout stuck in several of the links for years. More recently, one of the hearts snagged on something and bent. And then today, one of the links started to break.

So, I took the bracelet to get it fixed. They charged me $40. I'm not entirely sure that my mother even paid that much for the goddamn thing, but I paid it anyway. I guess it was worth that much.