About five years ago, my husband and I went to visit my mom in Michigan, and I forgot to wear earrings—I had left the house with naked earlobes! In my defense, we always leave ridiculously early. It’s a nine-hour drive plus time spent stopping for food, gas, and bathroom breaks. And we lose an hour driving east.

I didn’t like being earringless, but I didn’t want to shop for earrings. I decided to go without. I lasted for a day.

I turned to Mom for help. Did she have a pair of earrings I could borrow?

We mined through her jewelry box. I spotted a pair of gold and pearl earrings that I hadn’t seen her wear. She was happy to lend them to me because while beautiful, they weren’t her style. She likes silver earrings sized to pack a visual wallop.

As much as I loved wearing the earrings, I couldn’t ask her for them, so I was thrilled when she asked me if I wanted them.

A couple of years ago, I went to take them off at night and discovered one of them missing. I looked everywhere in the house because I felt certain I had both of them when I came home from work. I checked the floors, the sweater I had worn, the sinks, the dishwasher because I had been doing dishes. I checked the stairs, my car, the driveway, the garage, the deck.

I didn’t tell Mom. I didn’t want to admit I had been careless, or believe the earring was gone for good.

The next day at work, even though I still thought I had lost the earring at home, I emailed my coworkers a picture of the lone earring, asking if anyone had found its companion.

Coworkers were sympathetic: “Sorry you lost your earring.”

After a few days went by coworkers asked: “Have you found your earring?”

No, I hadn’t.

After a few weeks went by coworkers asked: “Did you ever find your earring?”

I hadn’t.

I kept looking in places I had already looked.

Two months passed.

One evening I opened the dishwasher to put away dishes. On the bottom of the dishwasher, in plain sight, was my earring.

It had spent two months—approximately sixty wash cycles—in the dishwasher, probably behind the bottom spray arm.

I told my coworkers who asked: “Was it okay?”

“Yep, it looks just the same.”

Another coworker asked: “Do you still have the other one?”

“Yeah, I couldn’t throw away a gold and pearl earring my mom gave me.”

But I had been thinking about having a jeweler make it into a pendant for a necklace.

I’m glad I procrastinated.

In 2014, the day before her 47^th birthday, my cousin Cally died of a heart attack. No one expected her death. She was young, full of life, part of the world.

Her mother is a cherished aunt of mine.

In remembrance of Cally, I made a quilt from scraps to give my aunt on the first anniversary of her daughter’s death. I purposefully chose to use scraps leftover from other quilts that I’d made for family and friends.

That so many pieces of other people’s quilts should be part of Cally’s quilt seemed appropriate. She touched so many lives. It didn’t matter whether or not she knew all of the people I made quilts for because she wouldn’t have known all of the people her love, laughter, friendship, and charity inspired and touched. Acts of kindness ripple from those we know to those we don’t know. It’s the premise of paying it forward.

When I finish a quilt, I sew a label on the back of it. Cally’s label was special because it was large, eight by ten inches. Using a special technique, I transferred three photos of Cally onto the label. In the first picture, the winds of Wyoming blow her dark blond hair off the sides of her face. Behind her a dirt road heads to the foothills of a mountain range near her hometown. Scarves of white clouds flutter though a blue sky. Cally is both smiling into and squinting against the wind. She’s about fourteen. All things are possible.

In the second picture, Cally is standing with friends in a market in Morocco. Cally loved to combine travel and adventure. She rode camels on this trip.

The third picture is a candid portrait of Cally, probably in her 30s. Her head is turned almost to a profile. She’s watching something or someone we can’t see. She’s beautiful. Her brow, nose, cheekbone, and jawline proportioned like a statue of a Greek goddess. Her given name Calandra is of Greek origin, meaning singing bird or lark. In her left ear, she wears an earring. I can’t see the details of the earring because it’s out of focus, but I like what I can see. It’s dainty, but not too small. It hangs down from her ear, but not too far.

I was twelve when Cally was born. Most of my memories of her are when she was a baby and a toddler. After her parents moved from Wisconsin to Wyoming, I didn’t see Cally or her older brother for years. In the early 2000’s, sometime after Cally had children of her own, her uncle who lived in my town died. Her mother, brother, and she came for the funeral. Cally and her mom stayed with me. We became reacquainted; the twelve-year age difference no longer mattered. We visited, ate meals together, and laughed a lot. I never saw Cally again, and after she died in 2014, I treasured that time we spent together.

Today’s earrings belonged to Cally. One is a moose and the other a polar bear, both large, magnificent animals that are in peril as the earth warms. My aunt gave them to me when my husband and I drove to Wyoming in 2016 to visit. They don’t match. My aunt didn’t know why there was only one of each. These earrings weren’t sold as a set—each earring has a different rubber back. But I’ve seen earrings that are meant to be a mismatched set. Perhaps Cally and a friend each swapped an earring with one another as an act of friendship. It’s something Cally would’ve done.

Perhaps Cally lost the mate to each of these earrings. Like me, she wasn’t going to throw an earring away because then both would be lost. And because a lost earring is sometimes found.

I wonder if she ever wore them as a mismatched pair like I do. It’s something Cally would’ve done.

I was eighteen the first time I got my ears pierced. A couple of weeks later someone bought me a pair of novelty earrings. I remember only two things about them: I didn’t like them and they were mostly red. With the logic of an eighteen-year-old, I removed the earrings which had been inserted with a piercing gun and let the holes in my lobes close up and heal. If I didn’t have pierced ears, I wouldn’t feel guilty about people giving me earrings that I didn’t like and didn’t want to wear. I gave the red earrings away to someone who liked them.

Four or five years passed, and I had my ears pierced again. After wearing the surgical steel earrings for the required time, I dumped them and bought these gold earrings. I wore them for months before I bought any other earrings.

I was in middle school in the early 1970s, when my mother and aunt decided to join the sisterhood of women who were ditching clip-on or screw-on earrings and getting their ears pierced. Money was in short supply, so they chose the do-it-yourself route and pierced each other’s ears, a method generally used by teenage girls at the time to get around parents who wouldn’t give permission.

I’ve heard the story before, but it’s been a while, so I asked my mother about it again.

“Tell me again what you used?” I asked.

“Needles, ice, and brandy were involved,” she said.

“Did you use a potato behind your ear?”

“Oh, yes,” she said.

The potato stabilized the earlobe for piercing and kept the needle from stabbing a neck or finger. The ice was to numb the lobe.

“What was the brandy for?”

She wasn’t sure. She thought they used it to sterilize the needle and wipe their earlobes before she and my aunt pierced each other’s ears.

“Maybe you drank it,” I said.

She laughed but didn’t think so because neither she nor my aunt cared much about drinking and neither liked brandy. But I like to imagine my mother and aunt sitting in the kitchen, each tossing back a jigger of brandy then banging their shot glasses on the table, bracing themselves before shoving a needle through each other’s ears.

“We used cheap earrings too because we couldn’t afford gold ones,” she added.

My mother eventually had her ears pierced twice because she didn’t like the position of the original holes. So, she let the old ones close up, and had her ears pierced again. But not by my aunt.