Charm Bracelet

While I was home this summer I was able to act as Maid of Honor for my dear friend Megan. It was a beautiful wedding and I was so grateful that I had been able to arrange my schedule to be there. As a bride’s maid gift, Megan gave me a beautiful charm bracelet with a cruise ship charm attached and told me to fill it with memories of all the places I visit with my job. Because I am five, I was thrilled to discover that that the ship opens and says “Take me away...” inside.

I have a charm bracelet that I started as a teenager and it is full of memories such as family vacations and high school graduation, but I am excited to have a bracelet to commemorate this phase of my life. It’s like scriptures: I have one copy of the Book of Mormon and the Bible from when I was a kid, a set from high school and college, a set from my mission, and a set for now and each is marked differently to represent what was important to me and what I needed to learn at that stage in my life. If I only had one set, all the markings would become jumbled and some of the meaning would be lost. I guess the comparison might be a stretch, but just as each set of scriptures represents spiritual phases of my life, each charm bracelet represents the adventures and milestones of my life.

I never found charms in any of the Scandinavian countries I visited on Voyage of the Viking and I still have several weeks of the seven-day Canada/New England run we were doing earlier this summer so I have been “shopping around” to find a charms I really love to represent these ports. I am not worried; my friend Jo is on a mission to make sure that I find charms I love (I think she and Megan would get along very well). So far I have only added two charms, one from England and one from Ireland, but I know that by the time I leave ships I will have a bracelet full of memories.