Broken Necklaces

There’s a necklace lying here on Cecily’s desk. The string has broken, and the necklace is here, coiled up carefully with all the escaped beads tucked in close. It’s waiting to be repaired.

I think it will wait a long time. This house is quiet and clean right now, but in a house bulging with 10 cousins, such moments are expectant, rather than peaceful. This one is longing to explode into hot, sweaty children and evolving adventure. I will resist for the big things—feeding, washing the important things, finding the library books, a little structure for the body and the brain—but then I’ll just let go and float along with the current of the summer, which becomes the rhythm of the year, and then before I have realized it, the events and excitement of a whole life.

I found more than one broken necklace, carefully coiled together with its stray beads, tucked into little nooks and crannies around Grandma’s house yesterday. They were tucked in alongside unwritten explanations—a tiny sea shell, a piece of smooth stone, a card, a note. The house was not untidy, but it was carefully folded full, and it said in every drawer and on every shelf, “I lived.” They left very little undone, our grandparents. The house seemed to me a museum of their full and generous lives. But they did leave a few broken necklaces.