Once upon a time, in a land far far away, in a place deep within the earth, one tiny carbon atom bonded with another tiny carbon atom, and then with another and another and another.  Over millions and millions of years – perhaps even billions of years -- those bonds grew and grew until they formed a crystal.  And then that crystal grew and grew until it formed a kind of lattice.

Over many, many, many years, the pressure of the earth pushed against that lattice, forming it into a rock, the hardest and strongest and densest rock on earth.  The pressure built and built until one day, the earth erupted, and that rock, that hard and shiny crystal rock, came up to the surface of the earth.  That day a diamond was born.

This diamond, which plays a big part in our story, was not a huge diamond.  It was not like the Hope Diamond, that humongous deep blue stone that shows itself off in the Smithsonian.  But it wasn’t one of those tiny little diamond chips you find in $99 rings at Wal-Mart either.  It was a good size diamond, more than 2.75 carats, which is not too big and not too small.  It was just the right size for a diamond that would be the centerpiece of a ring.  A ring that is the centerpiece of a story.  A ring that is the centerpiece of this story.

This story begins in a small town in Nebraska in the early 1900’s when Dorothy was born.  Dorothy grew up and got married and settled down with her husband right there in Nebraska.  Times were tough when they first got married but over the years, their fortunes improved and one day, Dorothy’s husband surprised her with a diamond ring.  It was a beautiful diamond ring, and it was a glamorous diamond ring.  It was a ring perfectly suited to Dorothy, an elegant woman who loved larger-than-life patterns in her clothes and big chunky jewelry to go with them.  The ring graced her lovely hands, her piano playing hands, and it tossed rainbows wherever she went.

And go she did.  Dorothy and her husband loved to travel and went to exotic places like Thailand and Cuba and Egypt.  She saw the Taj Mahal, the Eiffel Tower, the Pyramids. She traveled in Africa when that was an unheard of thing for a white woman from Lincoln, Nebraska to do.  

She always returned home to Nebraska after her trips because Dorothy was also a steadfast woman.  She and her husband started a business, and the business grew.  She had just one child, a son, and she built her family around him.  She was married to the same man, the man who bought her this ring, for more than half a century.  They worked together and traveled together and raised their son together.  They may have been happy, they may have been miserable, but like the pressure of the earth, which made the diamond stronger, the difficult times had forged a bond between Dorothy and her husband.  They endured.

Their son, their only son, got married and made his home in Lincoln, not too far away from his parents.  Soon, he and his then-wife had a child, Dorothy’s first granddaughter.  They named her Christina.

Christina was a beautiful baby, then a beautiful child, and now still, a beautiful woman.  Her long blond hair frames her bright blue eyes; her smile delights in dimples.  She is tall and thin and athletic.  She is a woman of the soil who has worked as an organic farmer, as a writer, as a house-sitter and pet watcher.  She is like her grandmother in that she is lively and graceful and loves to travel; she is unlike her in that she has moved many times and lived in many cities.  Although Dorothy wanted  Christina to get involved in business and settle down, Christina is a wanderer– a fact that Dorothy eventually accepted, although not without occasional comment.  

Christina saw her grandmother often enough to love her -- and often enough to endure her criticism about Christina’s life on the organic farm: “Stoop labor,” her grandmother would grumble over the phone. “When are you going to get a real job?”  And yet, Christina saw her grandmother as the glue that held the family together.  

And then, slowly but certainly, Dorothy could no longer fill that role.  She succumbed to the ravages of age, and in her late 80’s was confined to wheelchair in an assisted living facility.  As she declined, Christina visited one last time, taking her grandmother out to tour the neighborhood.  But as they ventured three, then four blocks from the facility, Dorothy became increasingly worried.  For a woman who had traversed the world, the blocks to a nearby park were now too far for comfort.  “I’m hot!” she declared, “Let’s go home!”  Yet as they returned, and said their goodbyes, Dorothy said: “Let’s put this one on the good memory page.”

When Dorothy passed on, she left a will, and in that will she bequeathed (such a good old-fashioned word) this ring, this beautiful ring, this large but not too big, hard and strong and shiny diamond ring, to her first grandchild, Christina.

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