I
was in a witchy mood on Halloween. It
was raining, and I was walking while
listening to the Modern Love podcast
when I saw something glittering in a puddle.
It was an engagement ring.
A sad Titanic, its stone was half-sunken in
mud and pointed up like the bow of a ship.
Instead of a single, perfect circle, the gold
band had an arm split off that held the gem
in its claws. I rescued it from the water in
hopes it held a story.
I brought it to Noodles & Company to
take a better look and ordered a drink. The
cashier hesitated. “I know you just got a
drink, but I still have to put in a name for the
order. Got a fake name?”
I said, “Witch.”
She
laughed.
“OK,
Witch,
happy
Halloween.” Then, she winked.
Or maybe I’m just including the wink to
make this story sound more witchy. Over the
past year, a lot of people have told me I have
a “witchy vibe,” and I’ve secretly liked this
new identity — it’s special, supernatural and
makes my strange stories seem like more
than just coincidences.
I do have a lot of witchy stories. An artist
once approached me in a Trader Joe’s
parking lot and gave me a photo identical
to one my cousin showed me that morning.
My clock stopped the moment my great-
grandmother passed away. My grandfather
opened his eyes in the hospital when I touched
him. I experienced a one-person hail storm on a
mountain in Santa Fe. While telling these stories to
a friend, the petals on a flower behind me fell to the
ground.
I was convinced this ring was just another witchy
thing that happened to me — and I needed to know
the story.
I posted an ad in the Ladies of UofM Facebook
group and plenty of people commented telling me to
turn it in to the police. I became more defensive with
every comment — I didn’t trust the police to get the
ring back to the owner. I felt eerily attached to it, like
I owed something to the ring.
I wore the ring for the rest of the night.
T
he next day, I received a message from
someone named Carey. We had no mutual
friends.
“Hi Hannah!” her message read. “I lost my mom’s
ring 2 days ago and was wondering if you found it? It’s
a simple design with a white sapphire. I’m looking to
see if I have a pic of it somewhere!”
I sent the photo before she could describe it to me.
Within minutes, Carey confirmed the ring was hers
and insisted on bringing me a gift. Instead, I asked her
to bring me the story.
We met a few days later, and she told me the ring’s
saga. In 1985, her father visited India from the U.S.
to see his family, and while he was there, he was
introduced to over 25 women to marry. He fell for
Carey’s mother and sent her love poems for a year,
including the ring in his final poem to propose.
Carey’s mother came to the U.S. the following
year. Since then, Carey’s father has bought her
mother plenty of rings, so she no longer wears the
one I found.
The two of us exchanged more stories and ended
up talking for two hours — I learned Carey is also a
writer, and we discussed our hopes to make systemic
change through journalism. We decided to meet
again and continued messaging on Facebook.
I asked Carey to tell me more about her mother
later that week. She responded that her mother is a
witch; apparently, the woman has flat-lined twice and
her blood sugar is regularly at a level that would kill
a normal person. Carey needed some of her mother’s
luck for an important meeting and borrowed the ring
without asking permission. In the end, she never got
to use its magic. The ring was lost by the time she
arrived.
W
hile writing this piece, I wanted it so badly
to prove that witches are real, that I’m a
witch, that Carey’s mother is a witch, and
why not Carey, too? I told the story to my partner, and
he simply responded, “Writers are witches.”
Then it hit me: He’s right. I’m not a witch, I’m a
writer. Not only that, this is a Modern Love column
and I’m a modern love writer, which means I know
there are stories happening all the time — we just
need to ask ourselves the right questions. Instead of
turning in the ring to the police, or keeping it, or even
accepting whatever coffee or dinner Carey wanted to
give me as a reward, I asked about her story because I
knew there was one.
I figured it was the work of mysterious magic
that Carey and I had met and held many of the same
thoughts on systemic issues and activism. Our nearly-
two-hour discussion touched on ideas also covered by
adrienne marie brown, a self-proclaimed witch and
Detroit writer whose theory of “emergent strategy”
shows how small systems incite larger-scale change.
In other words, if more people found connections
like how Carey and I found each other, these tiny
interactions will multiply to create a larger movement.
brown cites fractals in this argument, which are
small, repeated patterns that create larger systems
(think the designs of snowflakes or seashells). Fractals
appear in math, too, with the “magical” Fibonacci
Sequence where each number is the sum of the two
numbers before it. When squares are created using
these numbers as the base and height, they stack on
top of each other perfectly to create a symbol called
the Golden Ratio.
You may have seen the Golden Ratio before — it
looks like a spiral, or a shell opening up. It also sort of
looks like Carey’s mother’s gold ring, with the stone
being held on an arm separate from the band.
But then again, maybe that’s just me prescribing
witchiness to the situation.
I’m not sure why I was the person who picked up
Carey’s ring after it had been lying in a puddle for
almost two days. Part of me wants to think there’s a
reason we were meant to meet and connect, to discuss
systems of change when we were engaging in them all
along. Another part of me believes these stories could
happen a lot more if we knew where to look. Maybe
it’s witchcraft, or maybe it’s part of a larger pattern.
Maybe it’s even love.
Or maybe those are all the same thing.
3B
Wednesday, November 20, 2019 // The Statement 3B
BY HANNAH BRAUER, STATEMENT COLUMNIST
Modern Love: I think you found
my mother’s ring
ILLUSTRATION BY JONATHAN WALSH