Still Electric
I returned to Canada from my sister’s Istanbul funeral with two possessions dear to Donna that our mother thought I should have – her diary and her charm bracelet. I have never read the diary and never will, on principle, as Donna valued her secrets. And after reading “A Charmed Life” (pg. 70), Nathalie Atkinson’s examination of the timeless allure of the charm bracelet, I feel even more regret at misplacing my sister’s in the blur of my peripatetic youth. The heavy bracelet’s multi-layered trinkets were gathered in souks, bazaars and markets in Europe and the Middle East. It made me feel closer to the life she led the few years we lived apart before a 1990 car crash claimed her. Emotion, memory and nostalgia are often unconsidered side-effects of possessions…