My grandmother, who passed away in June of last year, gave it to me when I was 12 years old. If you wind it and open the lid, it plays Somewhere, My Love.
I do not have jewelry in this box. Instead I have more precious treasures.
One of these treasures is a Silver Certificate dollar bill dated 1935. The story goes that when my mother was born in 1944, her first visitor gave my grandmother this dollar and told her to save it for my mother. She did, and after my mother passed away in 2000 my grandmother handed the dollar down to me.
These items are guitar picks and smashed pennies. The guitar picks were given to me by my paternal grandfather when he visited once from California.
The smashed pennies have a picture of San Francisco, which I visited in 1977,a picture of the Statue of Liberty, which I visited when I was 13, and the Lord's Prayer on the third.
These coins have various meanings. My maternal grandfather gave me the Kennedy half dollars. He handed them out on birthdays and other special occasions. Some of the coins are foreign, left over from my high school trip to Spain and France. Other coins simply have old dates.
This is a picture of a picture my paternal grandfather sent me that he painted in 1978. It is a Polaroid and it is beginning to fade.
These are my treasures, worth very little to anyone else but very meaningful to me.
Treasures in a treasure!
ReplyDeleteI, too, have a jewelry box full of the same kind of treasure, including stones and feathers and even a little wishbone! I've always thought that if someone broke into our house, they'd be mighty disappointed when they'd look in my jewelry box!
ReplyDeleteNice...Those could have been my treasures as well. Now I'm feeling nostalgic...
ReplyDeleteThe coins and buttons in my wooden jewelry box certainly outnumber the jewelry.
ReplyDeleteThat is one special jewelry box!
ReplyDeleteAren't smashed pennies as souveniers the best! I have a collection of them as well. Fun!
ReplyDeleteI keep bowling league patches (from a youth program I had joined a long, long time ago), old coins, and silver dollars given to me by my uncle in my jewlery box. The jewlery I have is old and could be thrown away. I wear the nice stuff 24/7.
ReplyDeleteBTW: I think we have the exact same jewlery box!
My favorite treasure in your box is the picture of your grandfather's painting. How special! Perhaps you could get a professional to tell you how to preserve it since it is fading. You are so fortunate to have these things and the stories to go along with them!
ReplyDeleteI think everyone has a treasure box like this one, full of meaningless things (to anyone else), but priceless (to us.). Mine is on my dresser and now and again my son will pull it out and make me go through every item in the box, telling what it is and why it's important, making my treasures somehow his own, and by that act, making them even more precious to me, knowing they have come to mean something to him.
ReplyDeleteWhat is that about one mans treasure?
ReplyDeleteI seem to have a house full of 'treasure'. My husband calls it 'stuff', but I know each thing is a marker for a memory dear to me...another mans trash?
Thanks all for your comments. I am pleased that this seemed to touch you all in some special way. Memories and our treasures are very important.
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ReplyDeleteI, too, had treasures. They, too, were in a box on my dresser. One day, I came home to find that my house had been burglarized. My treasures (a piece of abalone shell given me by a college friend, a small ebony carving made by my Dad, a silver dollar and some other silver coins and other "meaningless" objects) were gone. I was crushed. It might not be a good idea to keep your treasures where a burglar might take them ....
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