Crusted and cracked, the stone was already grinding into a fine powder. Grandma held the broken brooch between her creased fingers, her eyes gazing intently at the fragments as if willing them to reassemble. Of course, they didn’t.
My feet shuffled nervously as I peered around the corner of a wall, watching as Grandma continued to stare at the fractured ruby brooch. She was still, transmuted by the crack across the ruby--a crevice extended across the length of her still-beating heart.
“Ana, you can come out now,”
I jumped back from the wall, amazed at Grandma’s apparent omniscience. With chagrin, I slowly emerged from my hiding place and prepared to feel my grandmother’s wrath. If I had broken such a valuable treasure of my mother’s, I reasoned, she would have berated me, and of course my mother must have gotten that habit from her mother. I steeled myself for the explosive lecture that was sure to come.
Instead, my grandmother shuffled over to me and looped her arm around me, still holding the cracked brooch like the last pearl on Earth.
“Do you know why this brooch is important to me?” Grandma asked calmly.
Surprised by her composure, I found myself unable to speak. I could only shake my head no. Grandma cleared her throat and clucked her tongue the way she always did before telling a story.
“A long time ago, my mother--your great-grandmother--was targeted by Mao Zedong’s regime because she belonged to the upper class and communism was taking root in China. The day after her wedding to your great-grandfather, Mao Zedong’s men stormed into her house to arrest her. Your great-grandfather pushed her out a third-story window into an alleyway on the south side of the house because the soldiers hadn’t anticipated an escape through an alley full of human waste. Your great-grandmother, carrying only the clothes on her back and the brooch your great-grandfather had given her at her wedding just the day before escaped on foot and found her way into the countryside. As she made her way across the country into a safe zone, she sold everything she owned except this brooch. It was the last and only piece of your great-grandfather that she carried with her after all those years, even after Mao Zedong’s reign ended. When I was around your age, she gave me this brooch, and when your mother was the same age, I passed it on to her. It has been a symbol of our family’s resilience as well as a reminder of our origins.”
As Grandma finished her story, I felt a new dampness on my cheeks. I never realized how important the brooch was to Grandma or to our family, and now I had broken it.
“Grandma, I’m really sorry for breaking the brooch,” I said, unable to look her in the eye without soaking the hem of my shirt with tears.
With a sigh and a hug, my grandmother rubbed my shoulder.
“It’s okay, Ana,” she said, a newfound spark in her eye--the same spark that had earned her the nickname of “the Wise One” in her village decades ago. “Family heirlooms can’t last forever. All of them are eventually lost, damaged, or broken. At the end of the day, they are still physical objects--objects that only carry significance because of the memories we associate with them. Though this brooch’s time in our family is over, a new heirloom will take its place, carrying a new memory and a new story that will make our family proud.”
Pressing a curved piece of the now-broken ruby into my palm, my grandmother looked me in the eyes and smiled.
“And it will be up to you to make that new memory.”