My husband mocked me for buying a little enameled egg at the flea market, but he was in for a big surprise.
First off, I have to tell you I’m a flea market junkie. I can’t help it, I just love the idea of browsing through the flotsam and jetsom of a hundred lives, and among the discarded trash find a lost treasure.
It all started when I was just eleven and would spend the summers with my grandmother in New England. On the weekends she and I would haunt every flea market or street fair for a hundred miles around, looking for ‘preloved jewels,’ which is what she called her finds.
Let me tell you that even today as a mother and grandmother nothing gets my heart pumping like scrounging through a tray of bits and pieces and finding a glint of something that tells me I’ve struck gold.
Sam sneered: “Oh I’m sure it’s a diamond,” he mocked me, and he took the egg from my hand. With a deft twist of his powerful fingers, he pried the egg open. Nestled inside was a tiny bundle of red silk.
I took out the little bundle and carefully unwrapped it. Glittering in the folds of the red silk was a pair of earrings. They were exquisite! Of course, they were faux, I thought, but beautiful copies.
Sam took one of the earrings and looked at it closely. The clear center stone was surrounded by a halo of green gems, and Sam breathed on it. He looked at the earing and he gasped.
“Jen,” he said, “I think these are real!”
“What?” I asked, “What do you mean?”
“I saw this documentary about diamonds a while back, and they said a real diamond won’t fog up with your breath. Look!” and he breathed on the big clear stone again.
I peered at it. No fog. I looked at Sam, then shook my head. “Hun look at the size of those stones. They’d be worth millions! They’re just good fakes.”
But Sam was excited. “Let’s go to that jeweler at the mall, ask him to appraise them.”
“Sam,” I told him, “He’ll charge us for that!”
But Sam didn’t care, so we drove down to the mall and waited with bated breath while the man muttered over the earings and tested them. “These are diamonds, all right,” he said, “And 18-carat white gold.
These look to me to be emeralds. Old cut, all of it. These earrings are probably Art Deco, from the style and the workmanship. You’re probably looking at about three hundred, depending on the quality of the stones it could be more.”
“Three hundred dollars?” Sam asked.
“Three hundred thousand, minimum,” the jeweler replied. I felt the ground sway under my feet and had to clutch at Sam for support. I’d found a REAL treasure!
As it turned out, the jeweler was wrong. The earrings sold for three million dollars at auction. The result is that we now have a lovely little next egg in the bank, and the porcelain egg has pride of place on the mantel of our new house.
As for Sam, he is now an avid antique hound, and he accompanies me to every single flea market and antique fair. We haven’t found that Van Gogh yet, but we have hope!
What can we learn from this story?
One man’s trash is another man’s treasure. Jen believed she’d find a ‘preloved jewel’ and she finally did, literally.
Respect other people’s interests. Sam mocked Jen’s passion for flea markets, but she ended up finding a $3 million pair of earrings.
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