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.

Mom discovered these white gold, diamond earrings in an antique shop in southern Wisconsin not long before she, Dad, and my siblings moved to Tucson, Arizona, in 1977. She told Dad about them, and he bought them for her. They’re very old earrings.

After moving to Tucson, Mom lost one of the earrings during a house party she and Dad hosted. The house they lived in had a spacious backyard with a pool, an ideal spot for an outdoor party after the desert sun set behind the Tucson Mountains. She lost the earring in the backyard.

After Mom discovered the earring was missing, guests helped her search for it but without success. She needed outside help from a woman with influence. She called her mother (my nana) who lived in Milwaukee, and asked her to pray to St. Anthony, the patron saint of lost things.

Mom wasn’t a practicing Catholic, but she had faith in her mother’s connection with St. Anthony. It had worked for Mom before. Nana hung up the phone and sent a prayer to St. Anthony. The prayer worked. Mom found the missing earring shortly after Nana’s plea to the patron saint of lost things.

Several years after the episode of the lost-and-found earring, my parents divorced. Mom gave me these earrings after the divorce. She also gave me five small diamonds that had been set in her wedding band.

I thought I lost these earrings once during a move. It was a couple of days before I found them. I had wrapped them in tissue paper and placed them in a plastic margarine container for safe keeping during the move. I didn’t call Nana to ask her to pray to St. Anthony. Maybe if I had, I would’ve found the earrings sooner. I don’t know why I didn’t call her. Perhaps I didn’t want to believe the earrings were lost. Perhaps I thought Nana’s prayers to St. Anthony only worked for Mom.

A few years after Mom gave them to me, I became curious to know if the diamonds in the earrings were real, so I had my jeweler look at them. Three were real and one was fake. I asked why that might be, and he had two explanations. First, the practical reason: A diamond could’ve fallen out, and the owner had it replaced with a synthetic diamond because she couldn’t afford a real one. Second, the nefarious reason: Someone sold the earrings and claimed all four diamonds were real to increase the profit margin.

The small diamonds my mother had given me were the same size as the fake diamond in the earring, so I had the fake diamond swapped out for a real one.

These earrings have a history that precedes me, but they’re not talking. I wonder about the woman who owned and wore them before my mother and I did. I wonder if she loved them as much as I do. I wonder if she ever prayed to St. Anthony for help in finding lost things.

The icy, pale blue crystals of these earrings remind me of NASA’s eyes. She was a Siberian Huskey and a loyal companion to a man named Tom. He named her after the National Aeronautics Space Administration because space exploration thrilled him.

Tom was a steelworker, who helped build the Sears Tower in Chicago, among other structures. He was also a private pilot and a skydiver. That’s how my father met him. My father was a private pilot who had a business hauling skydivers. Tom made lots of jumps out of my father’s plane.

Tom and NASA seemed made for each other. They were both strong, muscular, and compact, with piercing blue eyes, Tom’s being a couple of shades darker than NASA’s. They were both independent. NASA was protective of Tom and didn’t welcome other people or dogs into their circle. And that was fine with Tom.

NASA had an interesting life. She went almost everywhere with Tom, and when she couldn’t, she stayed with his mother.

In the early 1970s, when Tom spent a year in Hawaii working on a construction project, NASA went with him. She had to spend time in quarantine after arriving in Hawaii, but Tom wasn’t going to be without her for a year.

Tom had an apartment in Chicago, but sometimes slept in the back of his pickup truck with NASA when he came to Franklin, Wisconsin, to skydive. His truck had a topper and under the topper, he always had sleeping gear. They sometimes slept in the truck in our driveway or at the drop zone. Once when my parents offered Tom a bed or couch in our home, he chose to sleep with his dog in the back of his pickup truck.

When Tom moved to San Francisco in 1977, NASA went too. When she passed away after a long happy life, he buried her on a hill with a beautiful view.

Funny thing, I remember more about Tom than other skydivers who came to our house for meals or to have my father fix their vehicles. This is because of NASA. She intrigued me because she had a lifestyle that no other dog I’d ever known had. She was the only dog I knew of that slept on the packing table in a skydiving shack while her master went up in a plane, jumped out, and floated back to earth. She’d wait without moving, until Tom came back to repack his parachute.

And anyone who remained in the shack gave her space.