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Jessie’s Earrings
It’s sweet how a chance word can evoke a flood of memories.
My mother Jessie is gone more than 20 years and I think of her I often. But after talking to a friend about the current rage for tattooing and body piercing I thought of a habit of Jessie’s I’d forgotten.
She didn’t have a lot of jewelry and was the furthest thing from a clothes horse, but she almost always wore earrings. Her ears weren’t pierced and so she wore earrings that screwed or clipped on.
However as a teenager I wanted to get mine pierced. For some reason she forbade it, and altho she and I battled over many things in those years, on the pierced ears fight I backed down. I guess it wasn’t that important to me, but once I was no longer under her roof I did have mine pierced.
But as I knew from the time I wore screw-on and clip-on earrings myself, they can pinch after you wear them for several hours. And I now remember a gesture of my mother’s I found endearing. She’d raise her hands to her ears, pull off both earrings, and massage her earlobes.
And now how I wish I could watch Jessie pull off those earrings just one more time!
(For more about Jessie see My Game Mother, Fluffy and the Alligator Shoes, Elbow Grease, The Dinner Party, Art Imitates Life, Still Life, Jessie’s 79th, and Moonlight Sonata)
– Dana Susan Lehrman
Dana Susan LehrmanThis retired librarian loves big city bustle and cozy country weekends, friends and family, good books and theatre, movies and jazz, travel, tennis, Yankee baseball, and writing about life as she sees it on her blog World Thru Brown Eyes!
www.WorldThruBrownEyes.com
What a sweet, brief memory! I think those brief moments of recollection can serve as the most poignant presences of people and moments otherwise lost. Nice piece, Dana.
Thanx Chas for your sweet words.
Lovely story about your mother and her clip-on earrings. I remember how uncomfortable those were when I wore them as a kid, before I got my ears pierced. And your Featured Image of the girl with pearl earring makes me wonder if you have any pearl earrings, or if Jessie did.
Thanx Suzy. Yes I have a pair of lovely gray pearl earrings that Danny brought me from a biz trip to Japan.
However I don’t have any of my mother’s jewelry. When she was hospitalized and terminally ill she gave her wedding ring to my sister. Her other jewelry she had given to a friend for safekeeping when she left for a four-month stay in Florida where unexpectedly she died. Months later the friend herself died, and we lost track of my mother’s jewelry!
I’m glad you wrote about this–it is a lovely memory. The little things that bring someone back to mind!
Thanx Khati, so true.