A couple stands across the case before me. Simple, hardworking, salt of the earth people. The woman has just had her ring painstakingly repaired by us- worn prongs rebuilt, a missing side diamond replaced, the surface refinished. She gazes it at it in wonder,

“I’ve never seen it so bright!” She exclaims, “It must have been extra dirty. It’s as beautiful as the day we were first married!”

“So are you.” Her husband says softly behind her, barely audible.

-Cue heart melt here-

The woman blushes a bit, glances at his own matching band, and grimaces.

“Oh, honey look at yours. It’s so dirty compared to mine now. We should take it home and give it a really good cleaning!”

He shrugs, caring only about her happiness.

“Here,” I offer, extending my hand. Their eyes refocus on me, for a moment they may have forgotten that I was even standing there, “it’s not dirty, actually. Just scratched. If you have a moment I can polish it up nice and bright just like hers.”

“Okay.” He shrugs again, looks at her, wriggles the thin band off of his work-hardened finger. She smiles and looks deeply into his eyes. I quietly leave them to their memories, walk into the back and flick on the polishing lathe .

As the machine purrs to life, I hit the wheel with a bit of polishing rouge. The band in my hand has twenty-five years of history on it.

I touch it to the wheel and a high pitched whine sounds when the gold makes contact-‘ZZzzt!’

There goes the scratch from the barbeque grill, last summer when he cooked out for his daughter’s college graduation party.

‘Zzt!’

The marks disappear, the ones made by his hammer when he built the addition to their house in 1989. They hadn’t expected that last child, but it was all going to be fine now. And here go the tiny scratches from helping his wife do dishes for the past several years. Someone had told them to put the sizzle back in their marriage, and he had discovered that nothing set her on fire more than a man humble enough to help around the house.

‘Mmmp!’

Now I’ve removed the dents made by the sandbags. He had almost forgotten the year he drove down to Indiana with his church group, trying to help protect a town against imminent floodwaters. There’s a long, deep scratch here, he doesn’t remember how it got there, but only one thing makes marks that bright in gold. Carbon steel, possibly saw teeth. Another thing he doesn’t know is that this humble band saved his finger from a pretty good scrape. I wonder what else it’s saved him from over the years

The marks and dings and scratches disappear under the swiftly turning canvas wheel. Car repairs with his kids, years of fresh cut Christmas trees wrestled into a low ceilinged living room, gardening projects with his wife, fixing his brother’s deck, all of these have left an imprint on his life. The only marks that I don’t remove are the ones from softness- the ones that don’t actually leave a visible sign- a hand run through the hair of the woman he loves, the fingers that clasped his daughter’s arm as he walked her down the aisle to give away, the tears that flowed freely when his nephew was stillborn.

I can’t polish away that history, and I would never want to.