This is a story about earrings, but it is also a story about the exquisite yearning to recapture the past. The day I got engaged I bought a pair of abalone earrings at the FallingWater gift shop. I wanted to remember my engagement–the joy and excitement we shared, the trepidation even. The watery beauty of the earrings seemed to match the fluid beauty of the building’s architecture and it felt like the perfect memento for one of my life’s more remarkable days.
Last year, I lost one of the earrings. It felt ominous, and then I tried to tell myself that the earrings weren’t a symbol for marital happiness but just earrings, earrings I liked a lot. I shopped, hoping to find another pair of perfectly matched blue rectangular earrings. I bought stuff online that looked like it had roughly the same shape. I hoped these new earrings might be a good enough stand in, good enough to heal my loss. But because I grew up in France, I do not understand inches, and frankly I am a little sloppy about these things–my new rectangular earrings were much smaller than anticipated, and that seemed, symbolically, like a move sideways. I was not content and my loss wasn’t healed.
I wanted earrings that would somehow perfectly repair my heart’s longing for that perfect day and that perfect memory of love. (I think we both know where this is going.) A month or so ago, I went to see my friend Gaia. She is a jeweler and has really good taste. She had decided to stop using abalone and other formerly living materials. But she still had a few abalone earrings in stock. I tried to describe what I was looking for, but she steered me to a new design, and she simplified it a little in accordance with my taste. And that felt trepidatious but okay. My friend listened to me, and then gently steered me forward into the future that I cannot avoid. I’m relieved to say this future is pretty good, once I let myself move into it. I have new earrings (I do so love earrings), and they not only remind me of my engagement and the love of my life, they remind me of my friend and her precious friendship, and my ability to be flexible and keep growing, sometimes despite myself.