Silver And Gold

The title of this post is kind of misleading. Yes, my grandfather panned for Gold from the river here. Yes, my mother collected real silver coins. However, those items are long gone and likely saved in some safe deposit boxes I'm not aware of, and my mother has probably long forgotten about. Time will tell in that aspect of this ordeal we call 'cleaning out'.

I'm referring more to her inability to keep good things 'good' and separated from the trashy and junk items. One thing that she kept talking about for years was my grandmother's wedding ring. She never wanted to wear it because she just did not like wearing silver items (it's not Silver, it's White Gold), and she has never been comfortable wearing pricey pieces of jewelry for fear she'll get mugged. Therefore, I knew that the ring was somewhere in the house. Where it was, remained a mystery. Until yesterday.

Two days ago my mother was asking me if I'd found grandma's ring yet. I had not, so my mom went on to explain that it was 'somewhere in a bag on the left side of her bed'. Well, the 'left side of her bed' is the floor. The following day, Jerry and I went into the home again to clean, and the first thing I did was play a game of 'in search of', trying to find said missing ring. Figuring it would be of some importance to my mom, I was looking for a jewelry box of some sort, or a jewel bag. I was also looking for a small end table with a drawer perhaps, or maybe a small strong box under the left side of the bed. That's not where the ring was.

There was no strong box. There was no end table. There wasn't even a jewelry box or bag. I did, however, find the ring. Where was it? It was stuffed into a torn up plastic old plastic sandwich baggy, that was crammed into a partially torn small box (it appears to have been an old jewelry gift box but considering the condition, I was not certain about that), which was thrown into a plastic bag filled with old worn out receipts and junk papers, which was tossed on the floor partially spewing out its contents. THIS was her 'safe place' for my grandmother's ring. I was LIVID.

I was not livid because of the ring itself. I was livid because this was something my grandfather had worked to save up for for nearly a year prior to their wedding back in 1927, and money for rings like this was not easy to come by at all. My grandmother wore this ring until her death in 2000. She was, in her mind, eternally wed to my grandfather, and never thought otherwise at any point. To my grandmother, this ring represented my grandfather at all times, even when he was alive. If she knew how my mother had just tossed this ring aside like a piece of trash, she'd have been fuming with anger. Not because of any value to it (it's really not worth much monetarily) but rather because of the way my mom had just tossed it aside like a worthless piece of trash.