Pearl

by Amber Harvey

Susanna puts the strand of pearls over her head.  They hang down to her tummy.  "Beautiful," she says, running her finger along them.  She reaches for another strand and repeats the action.  

 "I love pearls," I tell her.  "It takes a long time to grow a pearl," I add.

"Do they grow?"

"From a little piece of sand.  It's hard, sharp-edged, and it hurts the oyster."

She looks down at the pearls.  "But they're beautiful," she says, not knowing what to make of this information.

"The sand doesn't hurt for long," I tell her.  "The inside of the shell starts to cover the sand with nacre."

She listens.

"Nacre is also called Mother of Pearl."

"Mother of Pearl," she repeats, feeling the words with her mouth, listening to them with her ears.

The mouth and ears are only four years old.  I remember that she doesn't need to know any more right now.  That's probably enough for her to digest.  We go on with our game of taking everything out of the jewellery boxes and wearing whatever she wants to fasten to either of us.

"Let's make a store and sell these jewels," Annabelle says.  She places the jewellery on the bed, necklaces here, bracelets there.  "You be the person shopping," she tells me.

"What lovely gems," I say with a funny accent.  "I think I'll buy these pearls."

"That's forty-nine dollars," Annabelle tells me.  I hand her a handful of air and she accepts it, then hands me the pearls.

"Those are pretty pearls," she says, only she calls them "pols" in her three-year-old voice.  "They match your pearl nail polish," she tells me.  Later, she notices that my car has a pearly finish, her bright, shiny mind always seeing connections.

I had a pearl ring once, gold with two perfectly matched pearls.  The pearls were beautiful but the ring held sad memories.  I gave it away.  I wonder, at times, where it is and whether it was passed on to someone else.

Breathing out and breathing in, from birth to death, the movement of our lives is like the waves that wash the shore and then retreat,

Leaving behind a piece of sculptured driftwood or taking away a castle of sand.

These same waves are the cradle that rocks the shell afflicted with the errant grain of sand,

that in the fullness of time becomes the pearl.

The little teeth appearing in Paulette's mouth are little pearls.  Little pearls are growing in Roberto's and Annabelle's mouths and already starting to fall from Susanna's.  Little pearls.  One by one they appear, and one by one they fall.  In, out, the rhythm of the waves, each one numbering the breaths we take.

We have time enough to grow pearls.  The pain of their growth is soon replaced by the joy of having them.  Will we have time enough to enjoy them?

I knew a woman who had a brooch.  It was a blue and white cameo, surrounded by tiny pearls.  Each time she wore it, I admired it.  One day she removed it from her blouse and gave it to me.  "You love it.  Now it's yours." Her kindness remains with me, and I wonder where she is now.

"Come and see my pearls," a friend said.  On her dresser, in a special case, lay a perfectly matched strand of pearls.  "My mother left them to me when she died."

For my high school graduation, my dear friend Ann gave me a strand of cultured pearls.  These are "real" pearls, grown from pieces of sand placed inside the oyster shell, like babies planted in a surrogate mother.  After I moved to Victoria I met a woman who asked me if they were "real."  I said, "Yes." She laughed.  I asked her why.  She answered, "Well, pearls are rather, ah, precious."   I don't know what became of that person, who scoffed at me and the idea that something precious would be mine, but it doesn't matter.

Our life experiences tumble and ripple on filaments of memory, stretching back and back.  Many of our challenges have formed pearls, and like a ribbon of pearls, they bring beauty to our lives.

Pearls can be white, black, grey, cream, and can be dyed any colour because they are porous.   Like pearls we, too,  absorb the colour of our environment, and the stains of life remain, whether dingy or bright, warm-toned or cold.  Each strand is different and each one is unique.

May all your grains of sand become pearls.

On Wikipedia we find this definition.

A pearl is a hard object produced within the soft tissue (specifically the mantle) of a living shelled mollusk. Just like the shell of a mollusk, a pearl is made up of calcium carbonate in minute crystalline form, which has been deposited in concentric layers. The ideal pearl is perfectly round and smooth, but many other shapes of pearls (baroque pearls) occur. The finest quality natural pearls have been highly valued as gemstones and objects of beauty for many centuries, and because of this, the word pearl has become a metaphor for something very rare, fine, admirable, and valuable.