Hope-objects
Written on April 23, 2018
MEMORY OBJECT (FAYETTEVILLE) — “My object is a gold ring that had belonged to my great grandmother. This ring was special for many reasons. For one thing, it belonged to the great grandmother that I look a lot like. Family tell me that I also act like her in many ways.
When I was a little girl, my grandmother showed me the ring in the box in a china cabinet, and she said that when I was older I could have it. When I’d go to their house (they lived just a block away from where we did), I’d peek in the drawer to make sure the box was still there. When my grandmother moved to a nursing home and we were cleaning out this ancestral home to prepare it for sale, I laid claim to the ring. The timing was important. I had just gotten divorced. I remember so well taking off my wedding ring and putting on my great grandmother’s ring. I transformed my family connection from one kind of family to connecting to my ancestors, to people with a long history of strength and love. It meant everything to me.
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The ring itself was modest. It had very little actual gold in it, but it never changed colors. It was a simple band with several markings in it that were decorative but simple. It also had three green stones in it (surely not emeralds) but they never moved or fell out either. The three stones may have represented my great grandmother’s only child (my grandmother) and her two grandchildren. Or it might have just been how the ring was made and sold and didn’t really mean anything.
I lost that ring a couple of years ago. I have no idea where. I’m heartbroken, but I’m also pretty zen about it. It’s just a ring. It did its job and I still feel attached to it even though it’s not on my hand. That tells me that it’s the woman who owned it first as well as my grandmother are what I feel connected to, not the ring itself, but I love that I had this thing that helped me do that at a time when I needed a connection to something powerful.”
And hope without an object cannot live
– Samuel Taylor Coleridge
There seems to be something about rings –about girls and rings in particular. It might be the happily ever after ideal we confine around this specific type of jewelry, or the durable materiality of metals, or just because we have been brought up to understand jewelry as a token of love. Either one or the other, I was too brought up with an ideal ring. An heirloom that, as yours, once belonged to my great grandmother. I didn’t share her looks, but according to my father, I inherited her feet –they were close that way, mostly when considering she from my mother’s side of the family.
It was a ring my mother came into on her 15th birthday — I won’t go into the Mexican quinceañera tradition, but it is part of the story of the ring that was shared over the years. It was a gift from her grandmother. I don’t quite remember the details or the speech, but I do have an image in mind, which I recalled when reading about the ring in a box; we share that. In my case, it was my mother who told me that when I was older, I could have it. I also peeked into that jewelry box to make sure it was still there; I tried it on next to my mother, and remember it was too many sizes big for me — apparently my grandmother’s hands were also well padded. Most other days, it laid there, awaiting our next visit. These shared nostalgic memories are relatable in more than a ring.
There is a particular void when losing a valuable object, but furthermore when the most relevant value is sentimental. It embodies a wistful space that we might end up using for self-reflection. I had lost mine, too –and I say mine, because it was the something borrowed that my heart didn’t quite give back. I tried it on that last time I saw it, before putting the velvet black box away. The heartbreak we share is not entirely related to the object, but rises from parting from heritage, from connection to family, and as a broken link to the embodiment of relatedness through a golden–or plated– piece of jewelry. These wearable-memory objects can represent hope in time of need, and unexpectedly parting from them can only translate to losing hope, that which for some reason feels lost without the object we pinned it to.
