Charm Bracelet

Every time we travel somewhere, I think about buying a simple sterling silver link-bracelet and filling it with a charm from every place we've visited. In all these years, I've never done it.... till this last trip to Savannah.

I was wanting to buy one of those "Bird Girl" statues, the same as the one shown on the cover of the book ("Midnight In the Garden of Good and Evil"). All the statues we saw were either too expensive or too tall and too heavy to bring back on the plane. Then I found a sterling silver charm of the "Bird Girl." Well, that did it...... and that's how the charm bracelet got started the other day in Savannah. I had planned to find a silver-link bracelet when we got back home, but while we were browsing through the Savannah shops on River Street, I found the perfect bracelet at a reasonable price. My husband bought it for me, and we made a list of all the places we have traveled to since we met in 1992.

I have discovered that those tiny silver charms are very easy to find on-line, and that's just what I did this afternoon..... for just a few dollars per charm, I found one for each city on our list. For New York, I bought an Empire State Building; for San Francisco, a trolley; for Canada, a maple leaf; for Amsterdam, a tiny windmill.... a cactus for Arizona; a Liberty Bell for Pennsylvania; a sand dollar for Galveston; a koala for Australia. I even found a charm for Yellowstone National Park, and Disney Mickey charms for both the Florida park and the California park. For a few of the states, I had to get just the state-shape, like for Connecticut, Montana, and West Virginia. And for our trip to Las Vegas to see Barry Manilow, I found a tiny silver grand piano. I even found a conch shell Key West charm. There's a special one for Ohio--- a tiny cottage charm, because we stayed in a small hundred-year-old cottage while we were in an Amish town called "Charm."

Tiny cottage........ which brings my mind back to the cottage in the Hill Country. I swear, I just cannot get that log and stone cottage out of my mind, no matter how I try.