Grace as Jewelry

At Christmas, the highest holy day in my heaven, she would give me small shiny opal earrings. These came to me every year, small treasures to guard my ears, to tell me I was safe. Every year I lost them in the wrapping paper and they burned in the trash barrel down by the barn, bloodless offerings to my carelessness. Every year I lost them and the next year they would reappear, only differing in the filigreed settings.

My angel’s halo was worn on her left wrist; bangled bands of iridescent plastic that I would stare at, play with and try the patience of her angelic love by making her guess time after time what color was the bracelet I was holding.

She wore earrings too, small dangling diamond chips I would touch tentatively, reverently. I understood the bracelets were her halo, but her power she wore falling like snow from the lobes of her ears.

When I got older, I could no longer see the sacred. I don’t remember it disappearing, but rather, it attenuated over the years until it stretched into a long diaphanous cord that kept us connected, unseen, until she left from the hospital one day and ascended into Heaven to sit at the right hand of God or as near to it as possible.

There was a small velvet burgundy bag that came from the funeral home where even earth-bred angels go. The icy drops that dangled snow were frozen inside the bag, gifts from her, from heaven.

As an adult, angel after angel came – the same ones? Different? I didn’t know. But by this time, there were demons too, who would shriek past, talons curled, fangs bared, like an interior tableaux from Bosch. But I still had the earrings. Even though I didn’t, wouldn’t wear them, they were the talisman that hid in the bureau of my consciousness.

I moved a lot. Once, then again and again and again, with the frequency that only a deep and pervasive restlessness of the mind, spirit and heart can know. But I kept the earrings, guarding them as best I could – a light confounding the dark. I hid them from myself in case an itinerant, interior demon came through the blood-stained lintels of my home.