A simple gold circle held in a rough toil worn hand, both showing enough years to wear a break in the band and cause calluses that no lotion could remedy. Both signs of a hard life well lived. What are the stories behind such old family treasures handed down from one generation to the next until names are forgotten and the jewelry itself sifts to the bottom of an unused trinket box.

Tarnished and the opal badly chipped but with a lovely old fashioned design that cried for cleaning and restoration.

Were they a set? These two rings stored long ago in my husband’s wooden box of old treasures carried from a homestead in Idaho to the wilds of the Aleutian Islands in Alaska. In that box also was a collection of old photographs, mostly without identification, but containing these two pictures (the ladies) of ancestors he could not name. Not his mother or grandmother, earlier than that in his family tree, circa civil war, he thought. Of what he could remember of his family, they hailed from the Midwest, Kansas and Iowa.

For many years after my husband’s death in 2006 the box sat gathering dust while I put all the love and joy I had with him into helping raise our grandchildren.

Monty Holmes Baker, my late husband’s namesake, and the intended recipient of the restored rings when he finds the one true love he wants to spend the rest of his life with. She will have to love flowers and dogs and Alaska and the outdoors, and of course, Monty.

Erin Phillips, jewelry expert, went the extra mile to lovingly restore the pieces to their former glory. She made them into an ensemble my grandson will be proud to offer to his heart’s choice and in turn pass along to a son or daughter of his own someday.

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