If you were born in the 1500’s (as my tween daughter likes to say), then you remember those awful letters that used to come in your mailbox. With the stamps… remember ? Anyways, I would always want to rip them up right away but I was afraid I would have “BAD LUCK 4-EVA” if I didn’t send out the same letter to at least 15 of my friends. Who benefited from that anyway? There’s a point to this story….just keep reading. But first!
Things I Love
Is the “leggings as pants” thing still a controversial conversation? Well I want to change the subject and bring in the ONESIE. ‘cause I’m in love. So comfortable and forgiving, I really do think they can be attractive. But maybe this is just me projecting my hopes and dreams onto the rest of you?
Love it when a disrespected flower gets a glow up.
This tea is a part of my nightly ritual (along with family tv time and most recently…the addition of an occasional embroidery project). Speaking of embroidery, check out what I made for my professor father-in-law. He’s always complaining about his lazy college students so I wanted to give him a short cut.
Introducing: CHAINMAIL
As you know, I love a good story. So today marks the beginning of a new series I’m calling— you guessed it…Chainmail. It’s an idea I’ve pitched to so many brands and individuals and influencers and no one ever bites….SO I’m just going to do it myself! I want to know the stories behind people’s favorite pieces of jewelry. Doesn’t need to be fancy or valuable….just important. So I’m starting with my own.
Wilma Bloch Reich is my grandmother, my Oma. I had a really special relationship with her and loved her stories even if she wasn’t always super excited to tell them. She was exiled three times and had a life full of loss and trauma. In my naïveté, I always asked her to tell me about it. Now as an adult I realize how generous she was in giving into my requests, again and again.
She grew up mostly in Berlin and was forced out of library school due to the German racial laws. Thinking it was safer, she moved to nearby Amsterdam to live with her brother, sister-in-law, and their two young kids. She wasn’t allowed to work so she toured the city on her bicycle and remembered it as a beautiful, albeit tense time. In 1938 she met my grandfather, her future husband, on a whim. He was delivering a letter to her older brother and she happened to open the door. My grandfather was visiting Europe after hearing that things were going south for Jews (understatement) and stopped in Amsterdam on his way to Germany. He had been living in El Salvador, learning the coffee business from his brother-in-law.
He spent two weeks getting to know my grandmother and proposed. It’s a winding, long story but TLDR he was able to get her a visa and a ticket out of Amsterdam that very same year. With no family and no language, she moved across the globe and made her life in El Salvador. A few years later most of her family, including her beloved mother, were murdered in the camps.
One thing she kept with her was a ring….her mother’s ring. She never took it off and I admired it my whole life. It wasn’t anything valuable but it was beautiful and had belonged to various generations of women in my family. After she died, she left a note in her desk that the ring was mine.
I’ve never taken it off since but I did have brief taste of life without it. Maybe 10 years ago, we were headed to Popham Beach in Maine and I had been rushing to pack a beach bag for the whole family. Once everything and everyone was loaded into the car, I noticed the ring was gone. I started to spiral but I didn’t want to stop the trip—the whole thing felt really childish. “It was just a thing and I needed to remember that.”
That night back at home, I was emptying the big bag of sandy clothes and wet bathing suits and at the very bottom…. was the ring. It had fallen off my hand somehow.
I burst into tears and my father-in-law hugged me. He knew how devastated I was and what a relief this was. And yes, I definitely got it resized.
Now I want to hear your stories. Chainmail is where we lean into sentimentality and tell the world about the seemingly insignificant (real or fake) gems in our lives.
Take care of your hearts.