Pearl
Susanna puts the strand of pearls over her head. They come down to her tummy. "Beautiful," she says. 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.
"That's what we call 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 here. "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.
I had a pearl ring once, but I gave it away. A boyfriend gave it to me and I gave it to someone who was my son's girlfriend for a while and then moved on. I wonder what she did with it.
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 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 coming into Paulette's mouth are little pearls. So are the ones growing in Roberto's and Annabelle's mouths and 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 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," she said. 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," my friend said.
When I graduated from Grade 12, my good friend gave me a strand of cultured pearls. These are "real" pearls, grown from pieces of sand placed inside the oyster shell, like babies in a surrogate mother. When I came to Victoria a woman asked me if they were "real." I said, "Yes." She laughed. I asked her why. She said, "Well, pearls are rather, ah, precious." I don't know what became of that person, but it doesn't matter.
Pearls can be white, black, grey, cream, and can be dyed any colour because they are porous. We absorb the colour of our environment, too, and the stains of life remain, whether dingy or bright, warm-toned or cold.
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.
