October 12th, 2018

This is my sister, Joy.  She and Bob have returned from their Ranger Adventures in Yellowstone!  Woohoo!  They've been gone about six months and my goodness, it is so good to have them back here again.

A lot of people that I love live in other places, but most of them I can still text, email, Skype and telephone with on a regular basis.  But Yellowstone, is so wonderfully deep into the wilderness that most of the time, we have no contact.  Joy is very good about calling at least once a month when she goes into town (about an hour away) to run errands, but of course, she is busy then, you know, trying to play, beat the clock by getting done everything on her gotta-do list in a very short period of time.  So naturally the calls are brief.  Just enough to let us know that neither she nor Bob have been eaten by a bear. 

But now they are back again !!!!!!!!!!!!!   They stopped by to see me live and in person on Tuesday.   I think I may have hugged all of the stuffings out of both of them :)  They didn't seem to mind.  It was so nice to be able to just sit down, face to face, and catch up a little bit on everything that has happened in both of our lives over the past six months. 

And just that alone would have been more than enough. But Joy brought me a gift.  She confessed that originally it was going to be my Christmas present, but she just couldn't wait that long to give it to me ;)   Here it is:

I did a terrible job of photographing it, dang.  Well it's very pretty and very unusual with little raw gemstones encased in that clear disk.   The stones are lose and move around within the disk so the pattern is always changing.  It's a nice length.  Longer than my short necklaces, shorter than my long ones so I can do that 'layering' things once in awhile.

Joy had it specially made for me. There are five stones, each one symbolizing my immediate family (Tim, me, and each of the boys). And that is significant on it's own.  But even more personal and touching is where Joy got the gems.

Quite a while ago now, when our Mother was still alive and doing fairly well, Joy bought Mother an unusual kit as a  Christmas gift.  It was a box of dirt, basically, from Montana I believe,  and the kit people promised that in the box of dirt were any number of raw gemstones just waiting to be discovered.  Our Mother adored this gift!  She could spend hours combing through and finding these tiny prizes.  We were all delighted at how much she enjoyed it but frankly surprised that the same woman who didn't have the patience to properly make Jell-o could   focus for extended periods of time on these boxes and also found, gem after gem after gem!  The gift was such a hit, in fact, that it was a repeat idea gift with new boxes of dirt holding new hidden treasures. 

After our Mother passed away, I honestly didn't give a thought to what happened to all of her little raw gems.  While we often spoke fondly of her and our memories of her including her penchant for jewelry, I never once thought again of those boxes of mystery dirt.

Well thankfully, Joy did.  She took those little raw stones and had different necklaces made for herself, me and both of her daughters.  It's a lovely piece of jewelry that is also very  personal because it evokes a great memory and is link to someone we both loved who is no longer here.

What a wonderful idea  Joy!  Thank you for the necklace.  Thank you for the memory.  Thank you for not waiting until Christmas to give it to me. And mostly, Thank you for not getting eaten by a bear once again.