the squash-blossom necklace

My grandmother was supposedly a rather eccentric woman.

My mother always told me that my grandmother hated slugs with a passion. She used to scoop them up and flush them down the toilet, but that all changed one night when she used the toilet and sat on one that had crawled back out. After that, she would go outside and use the salt shaker on them to melt them. I have a mental image of her with the salt shaker in one hand and a martini and cigarette in the other (she drank martinis way too much and smoked like a chimney). I think my mother also mentioned that my grandmother would even go out and kill slugs in her bathrobe.

She used to wear her squash-blossom necklace with her bathrobe, too. She loved it so much, she'd wear it with anything and everything. This squash-blossom necklace was Zuni and made with petit-point (the turquoise was cut into tiny pieces and the way they were laid into the silver was intricate). My grandmother died in 1977, and then our house was burglarized in 1979. Clifford, the burglar, took the necklace. He was detained eventually and imprisoned--some of the items he'd stolen from other people were recovered but the necklace was gone.

Strangely, my parents saw another necklace that was more or less identical to the one that belonged to my grandmother at an antique show in Denver. They bought it and my mother still has it. To this day, they've never seen another like it.