Saturday, May 19, 2012

31 Things

Sooo, I kinda signed up for a class.  A little one.  One of the blogs I follow, the author was teaching an online class, called 31 Things.  (Maybe the Baskin Robbins parallels drew me in?)  The general idea is to write one personal story a day, inspired by a particular word or theme that gets sent in a daily email, for 31 days.  Pair that with a photo, and you've got yourself a scrapbook.

My journalling lately has turned into a litany of how tired I am, how much there is I want to be doing, how sweet and clever the boys are, and how blessed my life is.  And how tired I am.  I still value it, the daily practice, but I've been sort of looking for a way to push myself a little bit, in the writing arena.  I have no time to speak of, to do this.  But I decided to do it anyway.

AND, if I post it here, I'll be doing double duty.  Pushing myself to write more AND filling out the content on the blog here.

Without further ado, I give you Day One: Jewelry.

(In real life, we're on Day Three...but I'll probably space them out a little bit, and reserve the right to skip a few days if I end up writing something unbloggable.  Huh, spell check doesn't seem to think unbloggable is a word.  Weird.)



I can’t remember when I decided that jewelry wearing had become a statement of self.  In junior high, I can remember planning out accessories with every different outfit, bracelets and earrings and coordinated socks.  Maybe when I started wearing my class ring every day, sometime in high school, I decided jewelry was something of a relationship, and that you should stick by your closest friends, regardless of whether they matched your socks.  

Now I wear two rings regularly.  My engagement ring and wedding band, of course.  I’ve worn those every day for six years, and my finger now has an indentation where they live.  The fact that I chose this simple, lovely ring and pointed Nathan to it says a lot to me about how we arrange our lives and our marriage.  Simply, not too worried about convention, and going with what makes us happy.  Putting them on in the morning after the shower is a daily celebration of married life, and a reminder of our amazing wedding day.

On the other hand, the ring finger, I wear my Celtic knot ring, the third or fourth iteration of this ring.  This time around, it’s solid, and worn nearly smooth.  I wear it to remind myself who I am, when I’m not wife and mama.  I’m the twenty-something single girl living in the woods writing stories in the middle of the night.  I lost one version of this ring the day I got my first “real job,” an obvious sign from the universe that I was selling out.  One night in the last year or two this new version cracked, leaving me to wonder what the universe wanted me to know this time.  I still wear it, crack and all, because that’s just life.  

From time to time I’ll wear a necklace.  One for my boys, with a mama bunny and two baby bunnies--I’m sure they’ll love that as they get to be grown up bunnies.  And my old friend, nearly as old as my knot rings, the ogham script necklace, which reads “kenavo.”  My reminder to myself, “Things will be as they should be.”  

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