My grandmother loved jewelry. 

She had boxes and boxes of it, and as a little girl I was completely fascinated by them. 

My grandmother was beautiful and glamorous and always put together. Going to church wasn't simply a matter of putting on a dress. There were the gloves, the dress, the perfect shoes. Everything chosen. 

She dressed to the nines. 

And then there was the jewelry. 

That was the part I was waiting for. 

She would open those boxes and decide what she was going to wear, and I was allowed to look through them, touch everything, try things on. All of those beautiful sparkling objects felt like treasure to me. 

I remember thinking that someday they would be mine. 

My grandmother and I were incredibly close. 

Many years later, when she was dying, I brought her into my home and cared for her for the last three months of her life. 

She died there, in a hospice bed, in a room that would eventually become my jewelry studio. Even writing that now feels strange to me. 

The room where I make jewelry is the room where my grandmother left this world. I didn't plan that. 

Life just somehow arranged itself that way. 

After she died, I had an experience in that room that I still don't entirely know how to explain. 

I was lying on the floor in the place where her bed had been, meditating with a beautiful clear piece of apophyllite. 

And then I went somewhere.

That is really the only way I know how to say it. 

I found myself in a place that seemed to be made of mother of pearl, sparkling silver and gold. Everything was fluid and luminous. It was beautiful beyond anything I could adequately describe. 

And my grandmother was there. 

I have always felt that what I experienced was a glimpse into a realm where some part of her soul now resides. 

I believe in the mystical. I believe there are experiences in our lives that don't become more meaningful because we can explain them. Sometimes the mystery is the meaning. 

And I know what that experience meant to me. 

What I find so extraordinary now is that I make jewelry in that very room. 

I sit there surrounded by stones. 

I work with silver and gold. 

I use fire. 

I take these beautiful things that come from the earth and transform them into objects that will eventually belong to someone else. Objects that may be worn for years. Loved. Lost. Found again. Passed down. Remembered. 

Sometimes I wonder how much of our lives is already quietly forming before we have any idea what it means. 

Because I think about that little girl sitting beside her grandmother's jewelry boxes. She didn't know anything about metalsmithing. 

She didn't know she would one day become obsessed with stones, alchemy, transformation, talismans, or the mysterious relationship human beings have always had with adornment. 

She just knew she loved beautiful, sparkling things. 

And she loved her grandmother. 

For years I thought the inheritance was the jewelry. 

Now I think it was something much more mysterious than that.

Maybe what we inherit from the people we love isn't always something they consciously leave to us. 

Maybe some things pass between us quietly. 

A way of seeing beauty. 

A fascination. 

A ritual. 

A feeling. 

A seed that can sit inside us for decades before we recognize what it has become. I thought I was waiting to inherit my grandmother's jewels. 

All these years later, in the room where she died, I understand that what she left me was something else entirely. 

I inherited the making of them.