The Gone Days of Our Lives

I know that I need to clean out my jewelry boxes from the past. Numerous large and tiny boxes abound in my bedroom filled, but sorted by type--necklaces, pins, rings, bracelets. Every time I get inspired to throw out the old pieces, I pause and remember. I remember that little blue-filled pin and bracelet that my aunt Pauline sent Mother when I was around eight. It had belonged to her daughter Martha who had eventually outgrown it. When our son got married, I gave the pin to my new daughter-in-law since it was heart-shaped with an arrow through it. She returned it two years ago when she and my son divorced. People say that songs bring us back to the age when we had a childhood memory; I believe that jewelry does as well.

Among my other collected pieces, I find a pearl ring that my boyfriend in high school sacrificed to buy for my Christmas present. His family farmed in the Mississippi Delta and could hardly afford a ten-carat ring from a jewelry store, yet once I set my eyes upon it in the window in Clarksdale, Mississippi, I knew I wanted it. I believe he gave up his Christmas that year so that I could have it. I wish I could return it now so that he might give it to a daughter or daughter-in-law.

Other pieces of jewelry from my life that's fleeing too quickly from me represent achievements: my Phi Kappa Phi pin when I was invited to join the academic honor society as a senior at the University of Mississippi, my Sigma Tau Delta pin representing the years I sponsored our English majors society at John Brown University, and my ten and twenty-year pins representing the years I taught at the college.

Will I ever be able to part with any of these mementos from the gone days of my life? Somehow I doubt it. My children will have to decide what to do with all these old, useless pieces.