A String of Pearls to Hold

When I was a child we were very poor and most of the time, especially during the summer times, we really didn't know it. It's strange how you don't know what you don't have until other folks make an issue of it. We were ridiculed on the school bus and other kids made fun of the way we dressed in hand-me-downs and hand-made clothes...that sort of thing.

I, for one, was proud that my mother knew how to sew and loved helping her make wool blankets for all of our beds out of old coats and skirts, lumberjack shirts and caps. Mother read stories and books to us nightly (we had no television) and when she read the whole Laura Ingalls Wilder series to us, I pretended to be a pioneer girl, just like Laura. When she read Little Women, I was Jo. I was Heidi and I was Anne of Green Gables. I reveled in their struggles. I admired their spunk. They were all poor and almost proud of it= they were growing up and developing their character. I didn't care what other kids said any more than they did. But some of my siblings did care what other kids said and were embarrassed about the way we lived and where we lived.

What I knew that only probably the more sneaky of my siblings knew, was that we might have been poor but our mother certainly wasn't. Upstairs in Lorette's closet, there were three plastic garment bags full of furs and lovely black shoes. And in among the slips and nylons of Mother's stocking drawer, she had a beautiful ruby ring with matching necklace and screw-on earrings. We played "tea party" with real china and dug in the mud with silver spoons with a "B" monogrammed on them for Brown.  And I knew where everything was hidden. So when I was sent to my parents' room for my daily naps, many times I would slide off their double bed and sneak over to my mother's oak bureau with crystal knobs and I would pull pull pull until the bottom sticky drawer gave way, use that drawer as my step and pull the slip drawer open just enough to squeeze my tiny hand in. Then I would take out the navy blue white trimmed boxes, sit on the floor, open them up and pretend that the ruby jewelry trimmed in gold was mine. I would sing a little song to myself "ruby and gold, ruby and gold, I'm young now, but when I'm old, ruby and gold, ruby and gold" and when I heard someone outside my parents' bedroom door, I'd come back to reality and put away the boxes, or if I didn't have time, slide them under the bed until I had a chance to put them back properly.

Once my sister, Jerri, caught me with the boxes and said, "We aren't allowed to look through Mother's things. I'm telling!" and I said I knew that but I couldn't help myself because they were so pretty. Ruby was our Mother's birthstone, or so we thought. This meant a lot to us that we somehow held her special jewelry in our hands. It was the color of our hearts, we told ourselves.  Maybe Dad had given those jewels to her when they got married. Maybe it was our Grammie Brown's jewelry and Mother stole it from her or maybe she was keeping it for her because their house on the Stagecoach Road might get robbed by a stagecoach bandit...

Once when we were digging around in our mother's drawer, we found the usual, silk stockings, hair pins, baby diaper pins, lone guarder clips, a few lovely scarves, a black velvet hat with a black fishnet veil attached, slips and tops, we felt something bigger and thinner than the boxes that held the jewelry. Jerri took it out and opened it up. "Ahhhhh!" we both said in a hush. It was an off-white string of pearls with an unusual double latch in the back. It was attached to the interior of the velvety blue box  on two sides, so it remained as if it was actually always sitting around someone's neck.  This piece of jewelry was the best thing we ever uncovered in the whole house! We didn't dare take it out of the box. We just stared at it until we finally had to snap the box shut and pretend to nap.

So, after that, anytime someone on the school bus or in the school yard would taunt us or call out names to us, Jerri and I used our secret code. We would look at each other and say, "ruby and gold, string of pearls to hold" and laugh that laugh of children who know that childhood is made up of crazy moments as well as magical ones. Mean kids as well as fun kids...and childhood only lasts a short while but adulthood? Oh, adulthood lasts forever!