SHOW AND TELL
THE SNAKE BONE BRACELET
In the comment box of this post, Ms. Candide asked me to tell about the bracelet. My reply was "I'll tell you mine if you show me yours." For, as you will see, there are two bracelets. She has complied with my request, and I will not deny her.
One fine Sunday I was out fossil hunting.
300 million year old tree fern frond, genus Pecopteris
I'd had some luck trespassing at a local quarry. I had scored a box full of crinoid stems. Species of these sea creatures have survived to the present day, known to scuba divers as sea lillies, though crinoids are animals, not plants. Generation after generation for hundreds of millions of years crinoids have lived on in the Earth's seas, and Tulsa County was under water from time to time during the Carboniferous period when the rocks now exposed here were laid down as sediment.
Crinoids, with a coin for scale.
On the way home, I stopped to check a road cut near Catoosa. There wasn't any fossiliferous rock of interest, but I found some bones of a more recently deceased organism. I often find animal bones while I'm looking for fossils, and I collect them, too.
A nearly complete skeleton of a soft shell turtle.
What I found at the roadcut were the bones of a snake. There wasn't much left; just a few ribs and the vertebra. I immediately conceived the idea of making a bracelet from the vertebra. So I gathered them up. Enter Ms. Candide. She had sent me a box of odd and lovely things for my birthday in March, which I enjoyed very much. I wanted to return the favor and send her a box of odd and lovely things. I decided to make a snake bone bracelet for her as part of the cargo of the little box I was preparing to send. I went to my local bead merchant for help and advice.
On the corner of 15th and Delaware.
The nearly completed bracelet.
What I asked Ms. Candide to show: The bracelet on her wrist.
After I finished her bracelet, I had enough snake vertebra left to make another for myself, since Ms C has such a dainty wrist. The bracelets are not identical. Ms. Candide's has smaller beads, and a little hawksbell on it. I made mine from beads recycled from a broken bracelet at home. I wear mine a good deal of the time. A little bit of voodoo around my wrist.
Wondering about the pinkie ring?
Elspeth and I bought the ring at the Human Rights Commitee storefront (Even lobbies have boutiques in our nation's capital.) off Dupont Circle and Ambassadors Row in D.C. It has a word from the the Song of Solomon engraved in Hebrew on it: Beloved. As in "I am my beloved's, and my beloved is mine."
1:39:20 AM 
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