The Jewelry Box

A TREASURED CHEST

She spotted it at an estate sale buried among the detritus of a life well lived. Sitting there open and empty it seemed a bit sad. Was it a metaphor for the woman who had owned it? Had she passed away with the compartments full of trinkets and the memories of the occasions where they had been worn? Or, had those compartments long been vacant, perhaps always so, the jewelry box being purchased with the hopes of filling it never fulfilled? As she picked up the box and made her purchase, she knew that she couldn’t answer those questions about the past, but she could determine its future.

The Jewelry Box had called to her. It demanded to be filled with new stories and new memories. She brought it home and asked her young daughter what she thought it should hold. They cleaned it together and explored all the compartments carefully. In the far back corner of the bottom drawer they found a tiny exquisitely formed shell in the shape of a cone. “Mamma!” The child called. “I know what this box is meant to hold, it is going to hold my seashell collection.” And so, it did. Each compartment held a special shell from a yearly trip to Sanibel Island. She only collected tiny shells and only put one a year in her box but each one spoke a volume of memories to her and then to her children and grandchildren, who kept up the tradition with their own special boxes.

A lost and lonely seeming box became a family’s special treasure for generations to come.