The Saucer of Single Earrings

The morning I actually looked

On my second Monday of not going to work, I sat at my dresser at half past six out of pure habit, and I noticed the saucer.

It has been there so long that I stopped seeing it years ago, the way you stop hearing the fridge hum. It is a small side-plate really, cream coloured, with a hairline crack running from the rim toward the centre and a chip on the edge that has been there since my mother's kitchen in Rustenburg. When the good tea set finally lost its usefulness, that one survivor migrated to my bedroom in Pretoria and became the place where I dropped things. Hair grips. A button. A stray five-cent coin from before they stopped making them. And earrings. Single earrings, mostly. The ones whose partners had wandered off into the great nowhere.

I picked the saucer up and tipped it into my palm, and I laughed out loud in an empty house, which is a strange sound to make at that hour.

There were, I want to say, fourteen of them. Fourteen single gold earrings, not one with its match. A little gold sleeper that used to be my everyday. A stud shaped like a tiny shell. Two hoops, different sizes, that had never in their lives belonged together. And underneath them, coiled like a small sleeping thing, two thin chains with their clasps snapped, the kind you tell yourself you will take somewhere to be mended and never do.

A whole life of dropping one of two

I have taught Grade Three for most of my working life. Thirty-one years of it, if you count the two I did on contract before I got a permanent post. You learn a lot about small lost things when you spend your days with eight-year-olds. A missing shoe. A single glove in July. The reading book that was definitely in the bag this morning, Mam, definitely.

It turns out I was no better than them. I just lost quieter things, and I lost them slowly.

I could tell you where some of the partners went, if I really sat and thought. The shell stud, I am almost sure, came off at a staff Christmas function around 2004, somewhere between the parking lot and the pudding. One hoop I lost swimming at a friend's place in Hartbeespoort, and I remember standing waist deep in the water actually feeling the side of my head, as if it might have politely waited there for me. It had not. The sleeper's twin I never even noticed leaving. One day there were two, then there was one, and then there was a saucer.

The thing that struck me, sitting there in my dressing gown, was that not a single one of these made me sad. That surprised me. I had half expected a lump in the throat. People make such a fuss about jewellery and memory, about the necklace from the person who is gone, the ring you cannot bring yourself to touch. I have some of those too, and I know exactly which drawer they live in and I do not need this story to be about them.

But the saucer was different. The saucer was just the residue of a busy, ordinary, slightly careless woman moving through her days. Nobody gave me these. Most of them I bought myself at the shops in Menlyn or from a stall at a church market, cheap and cheerful, because I liked how they caught the light. They were never meant to last forever. They were meant to be worn and enjoyed and, apparently, dropped.

The hallway that has annoyed me since 1998

Here is where the practical part of my brain took over, because it always does.

I have wanted to repaint my hallway for the better part of twenty years. It is currently a colour that the tin optimistically called Wheatfield and that I have privately called Old Custard since about the second winter. It has a scuff at exactly hip height where the corner of a suitcase has passed a thousand times. In the afternoons the light comes through the little window above the front door and lands on that wall and shows me every one of its sins.

Retirement does funny things to a to-do list. Suddenly the excuses fall away. I do not have marking. I do not have a 5:45 alarm. I have, if I am honest, more time than I quite know what to do with, and a hallway that has been waiting patiently for me to notice it.

Paint is not free, though, and a teacher's pension is a careful thing. I sat there with fourteen orphans in my hand and I thought, well. These are gold. Real gold, most of them, the nine carat kind you buy for everyday wearing in this country. They are doing absolutely nothing in a cracked saucer. What if the hallway and the saucer could sort each other out.

Working out what you even do with a handful of odds and ends

I did what everyone my age pretends they do not do and immediately did anyway. I made a cup of rooibos and I sat down with my phone and started reading.

I had assumed, vaguely, that you could only sell jewellery if it was whole and matching and came in a velvet box. That is not the case at all, it turns out. There are places that deal specifically in bits and pieces, the broken and the single and the tangled, and they simply weigh it. That was the word that kept coming up, weighing. They test the metal to see what it actually is, they put it on a scale, and the gold is worth what the gold weighs, whether it is a beautiful bangle or two snapped chains and a lonely sleeper. I found myself reading an explainer about how the Cash For Gold process works and thinking, oh, that is far less romantic and far more sensible than I imagined. Nobody cares that my earrings do not match. To a scale, a gram is a gram.

I liked that, actually. There was something freeing in it. All that anxiety women carry about keeping the set together, the pair together, the necklace with its matching whatever, and in the end the honest answer is that the little shell and its long-lost twin were only ever worth their weight and a bit of pretty design.

I read a good while. I am a teacher, I do my homework. I learned that the ordinary shorthand people use, the Gold Buyers sort of place, simply means somewhere that will look at your scraps, test them in front of you, and make an offer based on the day's price and the purity. I learned to check that they test it openly and tell you the carat, so you are not just handing your saucer across a counter and hoping. That felt like the same advice I have given a hundred parents about a hundred things. Ask questions. Watch them work. Do not be shy.

Counting them out on the kitchen table

Before I took them anywhere I did a very teacherish thing. I emptied the saucer onto a clean tea towel on the kitchen table and I sorted them, the way I would sort counters for a maths lesson. Studs here. Hoops there. Chains in their own sad little pile.

And I gave myself permission, one by one, to let each go. Not sentimentally. Just honestly. The sleeper, thank you, you were my everyday for years and you did your job. The shell, you were fun, you went to a party without me and never came home. The two chains, I am sorry I never fixed you, that is on me, not you.

It sounds silly written down. It did not feel silly. It felt like closing a register at the end of a year, reading each name, marking each one present and accounted for, and then ruling a line.

I put them all in a small clip-seal bag, the kind I used to send home with spelling words in. I read a little more, about how a proper Gold Exchange actually settles up with you on the spot once everything is weighed and agreed, and I decided that whatever the saucer came to, that was my paint budget and not a cent more. If it stretched to the good washable kind, wonderful. If it only covered an undercoat, then the undercoat it would be, and I would do the rest slowly, on my own time, which is a thing I now have.

What the empty saucer is for now

I have not spent it yet, as I write this. The bag is in my handbag and the appointment is for Thursday. But the saucer is already empty, and that has done something to me I did not expect.

I washed it. First time in years, probably. The crack is still there and the chip is still there and it still came from my mother's kitchen. I have put it back on the dresser, and last night, out of thirty years of habit, I took off the earrings I was wearing, both of them, a matching pair, and I set them down in it. Together. On purpose.

Maybe that is the whole point of the thing. For decades that saucer collected what I lost without noticing. Now I would like it to hold, just for the night, what I still have. The hallway will get its coat of paint. The custard wall will finally lose. And somewhere a scale will turn fourteen small careless years into a tin of something a decent colour, which seems to me a very fair trade for a woman who spent her life teaching children that nothing is ever really wasted, only put to better use.