My grandmother, born in 1902, loved her costume jewelry, i.e. plastic beaded necklaces.

I saved them for a very long time, just in case I ended up with a horde of granddaughters who liked to play dress-up.  Last week I spent a chilly winter day untangling dozens of necklaces and organizing them according to color.  They will be donated to a library charity sale.  Hurray for books!

This is only one very small part of Grandma’s horde.

I also sorted through two gallon-sized Ziplock bags filled with costume jewelry that I bought at auctions for daughter Nancy, who loved playing with it and wearing various “treasures”.  Rhode Island was the jewelry-making capital of the world for many years, so there is no shortage of costume jewelry in secondhand stores.

Then I came across this.

They are not real, of course. When I was a little girl we summered at my grandparents’ house on swampy Hundred Acre Pond. Year after year it was heaven, with our days spent swimming and picking blueberries and catching turtles. At the end of our cove, high up on a little hill, sat a house rumored to be owned by a college professor and his wife. No one ever saw them. Unlike many of the other neighbors, they kept to themselves. The wife supposedly had had a nervous breakdown, but no one really knew.

One morning I was out in the boat with my grandfather and my father when we heard someone calling to “the little girl”.  A woman came out of the house and rushed down the hill, so we rowed over to see what she wanted.  She held out the jewelry box to me and said she wanted me to have it.   I thanked her as she turned to scurry back to her house and that was that.

I’ve held onto that box of broken pearl necklaces for sixty-five years. I admit I have every piece of jewelry that anyone has ever given me, including my newborn hospital bracelet, but it’s time for the “pearls” to go elsewhere.

Maybe the mysterious woman on the hill was actually mentally ill. Agoraphobic, even.  Depressed, unhappy or simply content to live quietly and keep to herself.

The thought just occurred to me that she might have been decluttering, too.