Jewelry of My Great-Grandmother

My great grandmother was a collector of so, so many knick-knacks. She hoarded imitation food, squeaky grapes and misshapen apples and hard fake bananas; she hoarded embroidered scarves from Spain, pale drawings of lumpy badly-drawn ballerinas, statues of the Virgin Mary in stone and copper and wood. She hoarded knitting and cushions and above all she collected jewelry, from antique rings to trash jewelry, enormous piles of wholesale jewelry that poured out of containers and across tables and out of drawers. Her house was like a museum of jewelry fashions from the past forty years; I used to wander, run my fingers through them in awe and wonder.
When I was a young child, my great grandmother was sick, as great grandmothers typically are. Every weekend we would visit her, like clockwork, take her unsure hands and her quiet humming out to dinner and a game of cards, vacuum her house and push the heaps of wholesale jewelry into fewer piles.
One day she didn’t answer the knock on the door and I realized, even then, what had happened. I hid in the car and hummed Amazing Grace to myself while the ambulances came to remove the great-grandmother. She was ninety-six:96 years old and she had lived lonely for twenty years in the apartment she grew up in, unrelentingly independent, consistently unwilling to move to a nursing home.
They snuck through her remnants, weeks later, bickered over the vintage fabrics and sorted through the bad drawings and ugly statues, made great piles of things too tasteless to keep, meant to be passed off to someone, anyone who might enjoy a basket of broken wax apples with their red skins chipping away to uncover cool white insides. They gave me a pile of her wholesale jewelry to keep my slippery hands out of the way; there was a strand of rosy peeling artificial pearls, long enough to wrap around my waist twice, and a junky gold ring with a great amethyst stone the size of a pebble, the setting shaped to look like small sphinxes, foreign and slightly bent. There was a wire brooch and a lucite bangle and, nestled at the bottom of the case with a ugly goldtone chain twined through it, a real wedding ring. It glittered like a firework before they stole it away from me and gave me a wax banana to love instead.