Recently my grandmother had to move into an assisted living facility because my grandfather passed away and she is simply too old to be living on her own. I flew across the country to help her move in to the facility, which is close to where my sister lives and is attending university. A large part of the moving process was having to clean out my grandmother’s old house. This was no simple task because after all she had been living there for over sixty years and had definitely accumulated a ton of stuff. Memorabilia and knick knacks from my parents’ childhood overflowed the bedrooms and the attic, and it took several days of packing for it to look like we had even made a dent in the workload.
I really shouldn’t complain too much about the work it took to pack everything up, though, because it was incredibly interesting to look back at the antiques and the junk and see history. She had old typewriters, radios, televisions– just about anything you could think of from the 1920s on.
My favorite thing that I went through was her old jewelry box, whose contents included some of the most beautiful pearl necklaces and diamond earrings from the early days. Along with this set were the platinum rings she received as a gift when she graduated from high school, with three tiny diamonds set in the stone. When I stumbled upon the jewelry box and opened it up to see these rings, I gasped. They were truly breathtaking.
As I was going through more things with my sister, we found another treasure, hidden in the pocket of an old coat of my grandfather’s. It was his old tungsten wedding bands that he wore before his passing. The wedding band was quite heavy but it still looked just as good as new– that’s the special, powerful durability of tungsten, though. You could own a ring for eighty years and it will still not have any dents or signs of corrosion on it.
I offered the ring and the jewelry box to my grandmother herself, to see what she wanted me to do with it. She suggest I take what I want from it, then offer it to my younger sister. After my sister went through it, Grandma told us to just sell the rest to strangers.
Between my sister and me though we had basically cleared out every item. I grabbed my grandmother’s platinum ring to use as an engagement ring when I meet that special woman, and I also slipped the tungsten ring over my finger as a reminder of my grandfather. At first I thought it was going to be a pain to fly 3,000 km to help clean out a three-story house, but finding those items and hearing the stories attached to them from my grandmother made it all worth it. I definitely plan on passing on the rings as well as the historical anecdotes on to my future children and grandchildren, and I’m sure my sister will do the same.