Charms

I was searching through my car for something the other day and I came across a small stash of charms that Emma had made. She had made them in her freshman year of high school. She was participating in awareness activities for World AIDS Day and had made the charms to sell to fellow students to help raise money for AIDS prevention.

The charms are simple, but beautiful. They feature a circular coil of gold wire that straightens at the top to hold three small red beads. On top of the red beads is a little circle of wire to allow the charm to be strung on a necklace or bracelet. Emma made these charms completely out of materials we had on hand. She had a large collection of the small seed beads that she used.  For the wire she used, rather ingeniously I thought, gold paperclips that we had on hand. No one who looked at these little charms would have guessed that they started as paperclips.

Emma was always doing this – getting a creative impulse and then making something beautiful out of the very ordinary. When she went on an Appalachian Service Project trip to West Virginia, she crafted necklaces for her friends and crewmates out of materials she found. She made me earrings very much like the charms she made for World AIDS Day. One Saturday afternoon she sewed Sarah a skirt out of scrap material we had on hand.

It was heartening to find those little charms in my car because I know that there are many more Emma creations out there in the world, safely securing Emma in the hearts and minds of those who possess them.