And so this week’s moment of happiness despite the news.
Well, there’s no doubt which moment is the Moment this week. It sent me right over the moon, or more accurately, overwhelmed me over the moon.
I didn’t find my missing jewelry box. But I found my missing jewelry. The song goes, “Lookin’ for love in all the wrong places…” I was lookin’ for the wrong thing in all the wrong places. The box was gone. The jewelry…still here.
Continuing with a quest to get my house organized, to have everything in places where I know I’ll find it, and understanding all along that this was a thinly veiled way of trying to feel like my life was under control again, I turned to a problem area of my own. Mostly, my focus has been on Michael’s parts of the house, which ended up being in much worse shape than I suspected. Hidden behind closed doors, closed cupboards, closed drawers, was a mountain of stuff that should have been thrown away or given away years ago. And lots and lots of secrets.
For the most part, I was always the one that wanted to keep things minimal. Neat. Organized. Tidy. But there are two places where my own collecting has gone overboard. Clocks and jewelry. The next step in my organizing quest will be to start going through my clocks and slimming my collection. But first…I stood in front of my jewelry cabinet.
Years ago, I found on Craig’s List a listing for something called an antique chimney cabinet. It’s tall, about 7 feet, but slender, filled with five shelves. I saw the photo and recognized a fantastic place to keep jewelry. I had a jewelry armoire at the time, but it didn’t hold enough. This, I thought, would hold a lot. And it did.
Most of my necklaces and earrings, I keep in ice cube trays. These can be stacked. I had a lot of ice cube trays.
I brought the chimney cabinet home, and, appealing to my minimal nature, it didn’t take up much room, but kept its promise of holding a lot. I don’t shop for jewelry at jewelry stores. I look in art galleries, but also in flea markets and thrift stores. My taste is eclectic, and I also very much enjoy knowing that when I walk into a room, whatever jewelry I’m wearing will not be worn by anyone else. It’s not mass-produced by commercial stores, but by lovely individual people.
But…I no longer even knew what I had in there. Some jewelry likely hadn’t been out of the cabinet in over ten years.
A couple people suggested that I might find the missing jewelry box in there. I pushed that possibility away. The jewelry box would not have fit through the cabinet door onto the shelves. I didn’t consider at all that I might find the jewelry.
The first day of cleaning it out, I got through two shelves, stacked with ice cube trays. In one of the trays, I found a small pocket watch, which looked amazingly like my grandmother’s, passed down to my mother, passed down to me. It was one of the missing pieces. I held it for a long time and thought, No. It can’t be. Why would I put the little pocket watch in here, but not the rest of the jewelry? That doesn’t make any sense. But this little pocket watch was so familiar, and it wound – it was not battery-powered. I carefully put it in my “keep” pile. Then I worried over it the rest of the night as I tried to sleep.
The next day, I settled down to go through the final three shelves. My donate pile filled a large box, not just with jewelry, but with some little plastic cubes I’d bought years ago to keep individual pieces in that were too large to fit in a space fit for an ice cube. Scattered in different places throughout the jewelry cabinet, I found all of the missing pieces:
*my grandfather’s pocket watch, identified by his picture inside the back lid,
*my wedding ring from my first marriage, which also had an anniversary band soldered to it,
*a small ceramic pin of a dog holding a daisy, a gift to me when I was eight years old and in the hospital, for the third of five eye surgeries I would receive between the ages of 16 months and 15 years,
*my engagement ring from Michael, bought the weekend we rented our townhouse in Menomonee Falls, the first place where we would live together. We’d gone into an antique store called Needful Things. This was perfect, as Michael’s favorite author was Stephen King, and in one of King’s books, there was a store called Needful Things. Without my seeing, Michael found the engagement ring and bought it, presenting it to me later that night. It didn’t even need to be sized. It was perfect.
*a miniature gold hourglass pendant, filled with diamond dust for sand. A gift from Michael on our first Christmas.
*the diamond and ruby heart pendant that caused this whole search to happen, when I realized I couldn’t find it for Valentine’s Day, the day I always wore it. Michael gave it to me on a Valentine’s Day before we were married.
All there. All intact. All so very precious.
The hourglass and heart pendant did indeed come from jewelry stores, but because they were from Michael and from his heart, I didn’t care.
Tears have been common since Michael’s accident, then over the five months where he tried to recover, and since his death. The tears on this night were a mix of joy and sadness.
But how did they get into the jewelry cabinet? They were kept in a special little jewelry box, specially purchased for the pieces that meant the world to me, but that I didn’t wear often. I have absolutely no memory of removing them from that box and putting them away in different parts of the jewelry cabinet. They weren’t even together. They were scattered.
The closest I can figure is that I did it in April. Michael was home from the hospital, and I was trying so hard to make our condo comfortable for him, and to give him as much independence as possible. He was sleeping in Olivia’s room because he couldn’t climb the stairs to our bedroom on the third floor. Olivia moved all of her clothes to her apartment, and I then moved all of Michael’s clothes from his closet down to the closet in Olivia’s room. This would allow him to pick out his own clothes each day and not have to wait for me to run them down from our room. I took advantage of all the stair running to bring up a corner desk that used to be in our room, on my side of the bed, where it fit perfectly in a corner. Months before, Michael decided he wanted one of his old time floor-standing radios up there, and so it took the place of my desk. It also stubbornly always managed to find my toe if I got up in the middle of the night. So I brought the desk back up, and quickly hid the radio in my car, where it was then moved to the storeroom. The little jewelry box sat on top of that radio, and it wouldn’t fit on the desk.
I must have decided then to take the jewelry out, put it in my cabinet, and give away the jewelry box. But you couldn’t prove it by me. I have no memory of doing so.
But there they were.
All of the pieces are now safely back in the chimney cabinet, newly cleaned out and the collection slimmed down to the point that I know exactly what I have and where it is.
In total, I used to have 28 ice cube trays of jewelry, each holding 14 pieces. I gave away 17 ice cube trays worth of jewelry. The little plastic cubes I had, that held jewelry too big to fit in the ice cube trays, I didn’t make a final count of, but there were about fifty. They’re all gone. Besides the remaining ice cube trays, I have a few original boxes holding jewelry, especially from my favorite gallery in Newport, Oregon. I easily cut my collection by more than half.
Among the remaining, those special missing pieces. All of them. Eventually, they will be passed down to family members. But not yet. They are something treasured that I thought I lost, but I didn’t.
I can’t say that about my greatest loss of all. But I will make do with what he gave me.
And yes, that helps. Despite. Anyway.
