The Liquid Wash of Was

The birch in the back yard was a gift, ten years ago, from my parents. The brick walkway that leads to the front door was a gift, the last one from my mother. And this week, in between the rest of everything else, I was retracing the provenance of the hard metals and spark that I've carried forward, from girlhood until now.

I have been thinking, in other words, about the way things signify. About how often the objects in our lives are less about the things themselves—their utility, their value—and more about who we were at the time that they entered our lives, and who shapes our lives, and how memory waits for us in a quiet afternoon. Memory waits, and it lingers.

I'd bought myself a proper jewelry box, my first. I was putting my history in place. The ring I'd proudly acquired with the $35 dollars I'd earned one summer as a teen in South Carolina. The earrings my son brought home for Mother's Day. The ring I bought to remember my uncle by. The pearl that remembers Chicago. The tarnished silver from a friend who forgave me my decision. The ring I purchased one day, post-surgery, to prove to myself that I am a survivor, and the other ring, the one born of a poem. Reiko's Hawaii, in a pair of dangled fish. My brother's aquamarine. My own Seville, in tangled silver. My Barcelona, my San Miguel, my Nashville, my husband's exquisite taste in sapphire.

I have too much jewelry, I kept thinking, as I fit each piece into its velvet wedge. Too much, and I was almost in tears. But then the tears were for something else altogether—for lost time, for lost friends, for the liquid wash of was.