Treasures

I am not one for jewelry. Necklaces are like raw wool on my skin, itching and choking me. I can’t wait to get them off. Earrings irritate me, burn, call attention (so I think) to the wattle beneath my chin. Brooches come loose and pierce me or fall off. Bracelets get caught in things. I can wear a ring. A single ring. But anything else drives me nuts.

Therefore I have arrived at old age with very little in the way of jewels of the material kind. I have this one small jewelry box, a porcelain jar. The jar was a wedding favor (at a wedding I didn’t attend, in Italy), and every time Bella comes to my house, she handles the jar and its secrets. The gold watch fob my grandfather gave me. The pearl necklace my stepfather gave me when he married my mother. Four sets of stud earrings for occasions when I feel I must dress up. The bracelet given to my first-born in the hospital, when he arrived in 1966. Bella handles each small thing, each worthless thing, as if it were Victoria’s small diamond crown. With reverence, with affection, with familiarity and care. 

I remember my grandmother’s house. The lace doilies. The crystal ashtray never used. The Hummel figurines. The miniature portrait in a velvet case. How I would handle them, fondle them lovingly, and ask for her stories about each one. All her possessions disappeared when my mother moved her to a nursing home, but I still hold each thing in my memory. I know its weight, its smell, its meaning. They are in my bones.

Things that others have touched have power. Things we touch again and again, in association with a feeling of safety, a sense of being loved and indulged, take on power that seems to exist in our fingers, touching them. The possessions themselves don't have worth. We endow them with worth by loving them.

"Trying to be happy by accumulating possessions is like trying to satisfy hunger by taping sandwiches all over my body."--Roger J. Corless, Vision of Buddhism: the Space Under the Tree.