Telling the Amber Beads

with guest contributor Linda Saunders

I’ve known them forever, which of course means all my life – and yet something more. For I’ve a sense of their own age: if this is fossilised resin, how old is that? And there they are, too, in that studio portrait of a young woman long before she became my mother. Yet only today have I counted them, one by one between my fingers, telling twenty-nine, not quite as a rosary, but in something like a rite of remembrance. And I’m amazed to notice for the first time, doing so, that they are carved in two different forms which are arranged alternately through the whole length. One kind is vaguely organic, suggesting a furled bloom maybe, or sometimes the orb of a secret eye or tiny planet hooded in uncertain rings. The other type is more formal, with eight longitudinal facets, each cut again into little horizontal tiles which catch the light with a quick brilliance like a gem of fresh blood. All these beads are indeed almost the colour of dark blood though they wink and glow in the light with rich fire. A contained passion.

The choker sits on my mother’s young throat in her black and white photo at exactly the place where it sits on mine, resting on the twin knobs of the collar bone over the hollow between them. I don’t remember the graceful column of that neck, but the picture dispels for me the image of her old age, and the hollow returns a memory of intimacy with her body. As a child, I’d play with her flexible hands, massaged each evening with hand cream, and find on her forearm another little hollow, more a soft dent, which she said was where a dog bit her long ago. A clue, a fragment in the story of her life before mine.

The beads are light in my hand and round my neck. They are not cold as glass or gem stones would be, just cool but with a gentle promise of warmth that will respond to the touch of flesh and skin. I’m surprised by how warm they are when I take them off, and am moved, suddenly so moved, as if they retain my mother’s living heat in their glowing depths with my own.

The beads in her photo are alive with the photographer’s lights which shed no light for me on the occasion of the portrait. I calculate it was taken about a century ago, a mere blink in the beads’ forever. Clearly she has dressed with care, her dark hair cropped and shingled in the style of the 1920s. Her rather classic beauty is, or was once, well-known to me, but outside family origins I’ve no idea, even less than she may have had herself, of who she really was. Her lips are very slightly parted to show just the tips of teeth, as if she would like to smile, to please, and I find something almost painful in that. Her unknown life as yet to be lived and suffered. With the beads curled in my hand, my strongest feeling and thought is of a mystery which only deepens with the time a person has been known, and loved, and missed. In what distant time and place did an ancient tree shed its resinous tears?

Linda Saunders is a poet who lives in Bath. Her fifth poetry collection The Tall Golden Minute is published by Tremaen Press, 2023