Ivy Lodge by Linda Murphy Marshall

Author:Linda Murphy Marshall
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: She Writes Press

EYE OF THE BEHOLDER

If they’d wanted to make sense of my behavior with the silver brush, my siblings might have remembered a few years earlier when my mother decided to rethink her decision to have her two daughters and daughters-in-law designate pieces of jewelry we’d like after her death. She had instructed us to compile a wish list, presenting the four of us with a complete inventory of her jewelry. Janet and I picked sentimental pieces our mother had let us look at as children, pieces she kept in her old, beat-up, green faux-snakeskin jewelry box: a gold garnet ring her parents gave her on her eighteenth birthday, a tiny tourmaline ring, thin sterling silver bands, each of our beaded blue and white birth bracelets, our names spelled out in these beads; a few other modest items. Our brothers’ wives obviously had no such sentimental leanings and chose more expensive items.

My mother never mentioned the wish list again. Maybe she realized her plan had flaws, or that it would be a nightmare trying to sort out everyone’s choices, given the differences in value. Consequently, after she died my sister, sisters-in-law, and I took turns going around the table in the breakfast nook, picking from the large pile of her treasures till they were all gone. My first choice was an elaborate necklace that looks like a knight’s chain mail, an armor of tiny charms spaced with beads streaming in separate strands from a clasp made out of a large rectangular Carnelian cabochon. It’s the most personal piece of jewelry she owned, an unusual, beautiful piece of wearable art containing tiny mementos from all four of my grandparents, from her parents and my father’s. My mother had a large part in creating the necklace. She selected more than sixty charms from her own collection, ones she’d bought or been given over the years. They came from our grandmother’s charm bracelets, from pins and other random items she’d collected from relatives’ estates. She then selected the size and color of the accompanying filler beads, the clasp, devising the design, the shape of the necklace. She commissioned an artist in Arizona to create it with multiple strands of semiprecious beads of various sizes—blue lapis, orange carnelian, red coral, yellow tiger’s eye, green jade—to link the sixty-eight charms. It has her imprint, reveals her creativity, her personality, whereas other items in her estate were generic pieces or came from upscale stores or from the early years of her marriage to my father.

Nothing on the carefully crafted necklace, none of the sixty-eight charms hints at her role of mother. No baby rings, charms with our birthstones, beaded birth bracelets, profile charms of a baby or a mother, of a girl or a boy, nothing to reflect schools we went to, interests we had, trips we all took together. Not even charms we’d all given her through the years, for instance, the gold heart charm I presented her with to thank her (along with my father) for letting me spend my junior year of college in Spain.

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