Sentimental Sunday: I Want You to Have It

When I was 15, my grandmother (Elsie Beatrice Blagdon HAYWOOD) died.  When I was 14, she pulled me aside and gave me her eternity ring.  She knew she didn't have long to live, and she said that, when she died, 'the vultures would descend' (her words) and I would get nothing.  So she gave me her ring, a treasured possession.  Because her fingers had grown so fat with her illness, she could no longer wear it, and it nestled in its small velvet box, a gold band studded with tiny rubies and diamonds (or so I thought). 

After her death, I wore it constantly.  So constantly, that the gold wore down and the gems fell out.  I went to a jeweller to ask for a quote to put them back in.  "Hmmm," he said, "garnet chips and zirconiums.  Quite frankly, it would cost more to put them back than the entire ring did in the first place."  I could have been disappointed; disappointed that the gems were not actually rubies and diamonds, disappointed that the ring itself was hardly the most expensive thing in the world...but to me, the Queen of England doesn't have something as valuable as that ring.

Now my fingers are too fat to wear the ring, and I have no children nor grandchildren to pass it on to.  But it is still precious...