I Will Always Have Faith

July 7.
I wore a priceless necklace today to mark a special day. It is not a fancy necklace, by any stretch, and is probably only worth a few dollars, if one were to recreate it. But the value to me is immense…

I wore it to honor a woman who would have been 101 today, and who continues to influence my life every day, in ways that I continue to discover with each passing year. My grandmother, Faith, made the necklace, and it is a simple leather thong, with a few turquoise ball beads and some sterling silver spacers. It was one of her earliest dabblings in jewelry making, when I was quite small. As a little girl, I used to go through her jewelry box when I was visiting, spreading everything all out on the living room floor for inspection, and it was this necklace that I always coveted. The turquoise beads are a milky blue, almost green, and pleasingly round and rough hewn. They glow with the accumulated years of contact with skin, both hers and mine. When my mother was paring down her belongings a few years ago, she invited my sister and I over to go through Grammy’s jewelry, and we took turns picking out what we wanted from the stash. I gave my sister first pick, and held my breath while she chose another item. When it was my turn, it was the first thing I chose, and if I had gotten nothing else, I would have been happy.

My grandmother was special. She was young at heart, perpetually inquisitive, wanted to learn new things every day. She was funky and spunky, with rings on toes and every finger, multiple piercings in each ear, and she always wore layers of necklaces. Turquoise was her favorite, and she and her sister, Hope, used to make a pilgrimage each year to the Southwest, and would return from each trip with piles of bracelets, rings, watch bands, and squash blossom necklaces. I continue to wear many of those purchases, to this day. She wore beads and tie-dye and vintage. She was “Boho-chic” before it was ever a thing.

I learned to be a traveler from my grandmother. She took me on my first train trip, at age three, to visit my uncle in Texas. She took me on the train to Canada when I was twelve, where we stayed in an old hotel in Vancouver. Our room had a window seat in a curved turret, and we sat there each night, nibbling on fancy pastries from the French patisserie across the street, and watched the night life under the street lights. She took me to Chinatown, and we shopped for treasures, and went to the same restaurant every day, because they had the best pan-fried noodles. I have spent the rest of my life trying to find anything that comes close to those noodles, without success. I still have the emerald green silk kimono jacket she convinced me to buy in a Chinatown emporium.

When I was sixteen, she took me on a six-week tour of the country. We each bought Trailways bus passes, that would allow us to travel anywhere we wanted, and we made our way across the country, seeing the sights in Washington D.C., New York, all the way north to Maine, Rhode Island, and Niagra Falls. We traveled down the length of the Eastern Seaboard, looped around the entire coast of Florida, then on to New Orleans. We headed back west through Dallas, stopping in New Mexico to shop at her favorite turquoise markets, then finally meeting up with our family in Arizona. All along the way, we stopped at every point of interest, tourist attraction, historical marker. She made friends on literally every leg of the trip. She would sit directly behind the bus driver, and by the end of the day, the drivers had always given us a free narrative of the history of the area, the important things to see, and divulged the location of the best place to stay near the depot, and then usually gave us a ride there. I would sit across the aisle from her, in the front seat, listening and learning, and watching the countryside roll out before us.

I learned much from her, and it has all shaped the person I am. From her, I got my love of travel, insatiable curiosity, a love of animals. My propensity to be a bag lady and always have a fully stocked backpack has its roots in her…she never visited a public bathroom that she couldn’t fully disinfect, or ordered a meal she couldn’t improve with seasoning. She always had a map, or a Bandaid, a partial roll of toilet paper, or anything you could ever possibly need, all pulled from her seemingly bottomless purse. Through her tutelage, I came to love the history of places, the stories of people, to become a worshipper of nature. She was sure that she had some Indian blood in her, and that by extension I also did. She taught me to garden, to hike, to look for beauty in unexpected places, to expect kindness from unexpected people, to be an optimist in the face of adversity.

I keep a small circular box in my jewelry cabinet, pink, with lace on the lid. It was some old packaging container she had, that may have once contained a bottle of lotion or perfume. In it, I have a few keepsakes. My mother’s childhood ID bracelet, a book of matches with my grandmother’s name embossed on the cover, pearls she got from oysters somewhere, sapphires she mined in Montana. A picture of my brother, that he glued to a piece of wood and gave to her. Some drawings I made for her on Valentines Day when I was six years old, on which she had written the description of the artwork, as I had explained it. A silver lama necklace given to her by a relative that had traveled to Peru, a place she had hoped to visit someday. The silver whistle she gave me to take hiking, to blow on as I walked, to tell the bears I was coming. The newspaper clipping of the Mary Elizabeth Frye poem that she ultimately chose for her grave marker.

I have tokens of her memory everywhere. The Indian bells that she brought back from a trip have jingled on my doorknob for over forty years. Her binoculars sit on my desk at work. The 40’s era sequined wool beret, that I wear to special outings in the winter. Her box of jeweler’s tools, jars of beads, receipts for jewelry purchases, with the names of the tribes, and descriptions of the stores, handwritten on the backs. The amber amulet that she wore to restore her health, that failed her in the end. I wear something from her jewelry collection every few days. A necklace she gave me in the 8th grade, that had jangly clams and fish and a frog, that I could never have worn to school, because I would have been teased out of the building…I wear it now. The ring I wore for my wedding, set with some of her Montana sapphires, was one she had made when I was a child, and whenever she had me with her on a trip to the bank, we would go into the safe deposit vault, and she would show it to me, with the promise that it would be mine when I turned 21. When it was presented to me on my 19th birthday, I wept, because we both knew she was not going to be around for my 21st.

My memories of my grandmother are still with me: her garden, her secret treasures biding their time in musty basements and overflowing closets. The lush backyard that had the greenest grass, the biggest raspberries, the sweetest plums, the tallest tiger lily. Hummingbirds that kept her company as she gardened, hovering near her shoulder as she worked. Violet perfume, vintage leather travel cases, Wild Kingdom on the “telly” at dinnertime. Little things that she told me lodged in my brain, and surface at unexpected times. So many have turned out to be right. She told me to never throw anything out, because it would always come back in style. In college, I wore out a short wool skirt and black suede boots that would be as trendy now as they were when she bought them in the 40’s. She taught me that it was best to wear black, because that was the best way to show off your jewelry. She told me to find a man that was kind to animals, because he would be kind to everyone.

My grandparents are buried in a small cemetery in my hometown of Edmonds, in a plot she chose under a giant pine tree. I don’t visit it often, because contrary to the orders on her gravestone, I do stand at her grave and weep. Instead, I try to honor her by living the life she would have wanted me to live…one full of joy, adventure, curiosity, optimism, learning and tolerance. I think she would have been proud of the woman I am trying to be, and I know she would be pleased that she lives on inside me…that I will always have Faith.

Do not stand at my grave and weep
I am not there, I do not sleep.
I am a thousand winds that blow,
I am the diamond glints on snow,
I am the sun on ripened grain,
I am the gentle autumn rain.
When you awaken in the morning’s hush
I am the swift uplifting rush
of quiet birds in circle flight.
I am the soft stars that shine at night.
Do not stand at my grave and cry.
I am not there, I did not die.

Mary Elizabeth Frye