Its Friday night. I’m sitting at home after a hastily-prepared but tasty meal. My children are clambering over my legs and putting questionable things into my hair. My feet ache- not from standing in one place all day but from walking back and forth throughout the store, balancing on one foot while a customer regales me with stories, and constantly getting up and down to answer the ding of the door.

Its been a busy week, as usual. I’ve changed your watch batteries, sized your watch bands. I’ve drawn sketches for you- sketches of rings and pendants made from your mother’s diamonds and your old high school class ring. I’ve listened to you tell me about how your hands swell in the morning, ...

I’ll always remember my first time at the wheel. I was a short, scrawny, 9 year old girl with straggly, brown hair. I did not know what I was doing.

Zzz… zzz…zzz, went the hard, abrasive wheel, as I gouged deep, rough valleys into the thin, silver, practice ring, that was just cast and cleaned. Trying to take down the casting sprue. Then the ring slipped off the wheel and my finger received the same treatment. Zzz… into my soft, not yet calloused finger tip. I received a little instruction from my teacher, my dad. He showed me how to firmly but gently, roll the ring into the wheel to keep the nice ...

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 no ...

Child Labor laws notwithstanding, my dad made us all work in the shop from a very early age. Sometimes it was good fun- learning to melt the wax and playing with tiny Austrian Crystals were things any child would enjoy. Other times it was not so fun, but we survived.

My right ring finger, however, almost didn’t.

The year was 1991. I was thirteen, in my first semester of full homeschooling, and my dad had found a great advantage to his daughters not being away at school for 7 hours a day: he could have us help out in the store nearly full time.

I would come to work with him in the morning, my hair up in a banana comb most days. We would park in back of the little strip mall on Speedway Boulevard in ...

The woman standing in front of me is regal and beautiful, even at middle age. After 28 years of marriage, her husband is leaving her. She mentions it quietly, ashamed of her newly single status. Her rings sit in front of me, resting top-down on the black velvet pad that I’ve just pulled out. The symbolism is staggering to me- funereal and final. I am about to melt the rings down, reforming the gold into a shape that is not a wedding band. There are a few small diamonds in the engagement ring, diamonds that carried her down a white-decked aisle so very many years ago. She has never asked for more than the simple sparkling stones on her hand, and never received any more. To these diamonds, I will add the birthstones of ...