Sparkles

by Louise Yeiser

I remember summers in Cape Cod at my grandmother’s cottage, sitting on a stool, watching a white curtain curving, flowing, waving into a sunny room that smelled like cedar and pine, and standing in front of a three-tiered rack of baubles, staring at rows and rows of colored, flashing birth stones, fashioned into rings and necklaces, each for a dollar. I fell into the bright, endless spectrum of radiant rubies, precious peridots and luscious, lavender amethysts, and I liked it. “Mom, please?” I begged. “No, they’re only glass,” mom would reply absentmindedly, as she filled her red basket with paper towels, tissues, and Pond’s cold cream that felt like Crisco icing on her cheeks at night, offering me no safe landing for a goodnight kiss. Glass or stone, no matter. I wanted the twinkling on my finger, around my neck, so I could sit on my stool and be the magic, and move the sparkle through the sunbeams of the window with the curtain, and turn it this way and that, and continue my forever freefall.

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Louise Yeiser, author of The Secret, is a published writer and Creative Nonfiction student who collects diamond rings.