Summer Jewelry, and the Garden on the Windowsill

   It is the last Saturday in May and there is a new piece of furniture on the windowsill: a small wooden box with three terracotta pots inside it, basil and parsley and a small thyme that I have already prematurely declared the favorite. I bought them as seedlings from a corner store on Eighth Avenue last weekend, transferred them into the pots with my hands cold from the soil, and placed them on the windowsill where the afternoon light lives. They have been there for six days, during which the basil has grown approximately half an inch. I have checked twice an hour. This is, I am told, what it means to garden. The slowness is the point. The slowness, I am realizing, is also what summer is actually asking of me. It is not the productive months I have been treating it as for the past three years, and it is not the season for catching up on the things I have postponed. It is something closer to the way the basil is choosing to grow, which is in its own time, without my supervision, and approximately at the speed of a chain becoming softer at the edges from being worn for two years. The chain at my collarbone is from the dish on the dresser, two feet to the left of the windowsill. The basil and the chain are doing the same thing, which is sitting still in the same kind of light, accumulating themselves slowly into something I will be glad to have eventually, if I leave them alone.

   What jewelry should you wear in summer? The jewelry to wear in summer is what holds up to sweat, sun, water, and sunscreen without fading or tarnishing through the season. In practice this means stainless steel chains and rings for the daily hours, sterling silver pieces for the evening, and pearls for the moments when the season asks for something with more presence on the body. Summer is the season most punishing on jewelry, and most jewelers will admit this if you ask them directly. The combination of heat, humidity, sunscreen, and chlorine makes June through August the months when sterling silver tarnishes fastest, when stones come loose from their settings, and when chains develop a fine film of residue that requires more cleaning than the rest of the year combined. None of this is a reason not to wear jewelry in summer. It is a reason to choose summer pieces with the season in mind.

   The case for stainless steel as the summer daily material is straightforward. It does not tarnish from sweat, does not react with sunscreen, does not develop residue from chlorine, and holds its color through the season without intervention. The chain you put on in May will be the same chain you put on in September. For a wearer who works through the summer and would rather not think about her jewelry between Memorial Day and Labor Day, stainless steel pieces are the foundation of a summer practice. Sterling silver remains the after-hours material, more so in summer than in any other season. The chain worn to dinner outside, the small charm that lives on the chain reached for after the sun has dropped, the ring that catches candlelight on a Saturday in July. These are not the pieces that need to survive an eight-hour shift outdoors. They are the pieces that show up after the sun has done its work. The 925 Sterling Silver Collection was built with this register in mind.

   How does summer heat affect jewelry? Summer heat accelerates the chemical reactions that cause silver to tarnish. Sweat, sunscreen, chlorine, and saltwater each contain compounds that react with silver and leave residue or dim the surface. Stainless steel is immune to these. Sterling silver tarnishes faster in summer than in any other season, which is why most jewelers recommend cleaning it more often from May through September. The specifics matter for anyone who wants to understand what they are protecting their pieces from. Sweat is mildly acidic, which means it slowly etches the surface of silver over time. Sunscreen contains zinc oxide and titanium dioxide, both of which form a fine residue on metal surfaces that dims the finish if not cleaned off within a day or two. Chlorine is the most aggressive of the four, capable of darkening sterling silver within a single afternoon at the pool. Saltwater is gentler than chlorine but still leaves a residue that should be rinsed off. None of this is a reason to take pieces off before doing anything fun, despite what some jewelry care guides imply. The wearer who loves her pieces enough to wear them every day is the same wearer who has accepted that summer will leave its small marks on the silver, and that those marks are the cost of the pieces having been part of the season at all. The longer reading on why sterling silver tarnishes covers the chemistry without panic. The short version for summer: rinse pieces with cool water after pool or ocean days, wipe them with a soft cloth before storing, and accept the rest. For wearers who want to keep pieces in their best summer condition, the jewelry care page covers the full care routine. The seasonal addition is to store sterling silver in a sealed container with an anti-tarnish strip during the months when humidity stays high, which is when silver wants the most protection from the air it would otherwise be sitting in unprotected.

   Why pearls belong to summer Pearls belong to summer because they want warmth in a way other jewelry materials do not. Saltwater built them, skin oil polishes them, and the slight humidity of a city summer actually helps the surface stay rather than fade. Heat does not damage them, and sunlight does not dim them. Wearing pearls in May, June, July, and August is wearing the material at the season it was made for. Pearls have been associated with winter for so long that most people forget they were grown in warm water by living creatures. They are alive in a way other jewelry materials are not. The strand worn over a turtleneck at a holiday party is the same strand that wants to be worn over bare collarbones in July, and the strand is happier in July. The body knows this even when the conventions do not. The pearl guide on the Glass Balloon site has the longer reading on pearl care, but the part that matters for summer is short. Pearls do not need anti-tarnish strips. They do not need to be stored in dry conditions. They benefit from being worn against the skin, which is why the saying about pearls dying in a drawer is approximately true. The pearl that lives in a velvet pouch for ten years dims. The pearl that lives at the base of a chain on a Saturday in July becomes more itself. The pearl beaded necklaces were chosen with this in mind. Some are worn as a single strand on warm skin, some are mixed in with chains, some are knotted between silver charms or pendants. They are not meant for the holiday tradition. They are meant for the slow Saturdays of June, the dinner outside in July, the long August where the wearer has accepted that the pieces will live next to her skin through every kind of warmth the season is willing to offer.

   The pieces that pair with the kitchen garden are the ones that handle daily contact with soil, water, and sun. These look like a daily ring that fits close to the finger, a chain that does not catch on a basil stem, and a pair of small hoops or studs that stay in through dishwashing. These are not separate from the after-hours pieces in the dish on the dresser. They are the same pieces in a different register. There is something I did not understand about jewelry until I started growing things, which is that the pieces I wear are part of how I show up to the small daily practices that make a life. The hand reaching for the basil to pinch off a leaf for the salad has a ring on it. The hand wiping condensation off the side of the glass of iced water at the kitchen counter has a ring on it. The hand on the watering can, the hand on the kitchen knife, the hand opening the kitchen window in the morning, all of them are the same hand, doing the same work, wearing the same ring. The chain at the collarbone behaves the same way. It is not separate from the morning at the windowsill or the afternoon at the kitchen counter or the evening on the small chair where the cat sleeps next to the basil now. It is part of how the day is wearing me, and how I am wearing the day, and the small chain has accumulated more meaning in two summers than most jewelry accumulates in a lifetime of being saved for the right occasion. This is the Glass Balloon position on what makes jewelry look expensive, which is that confidence in choosing reads on the body more clearly than any single piece does. The wearer who has accepted that her pieces are part of her daily life, who has stopped removing them for the kitchen and the garden and the swim and the shower, who treats her jewelry as part of the architecture of her body rather than as a thing she puts on for an audience, is the wearer Glass Balloon writes for.

   It is now ten at night and the basil is taller than it was this morning, or I am imagining that it is taller, which is approximately the same thing. The thyme has done nothing visible. The parsley has dropped a single leaf that I cannot bring myself to throw away. The chain at the collarbone has not done much either, but the small charm at the base of it has rotated slightly counterclockwise from where I put it on at noon, which is the small movement that tells me the day has been a day. The windowsill is the part of the apartment that has come closest to feeling like ours, in the month we have lived here. The basil arrived as a stranger and has become a small known thing. The chain at the collarbone arrived as the chain I had been wearing for years, and has not changed at all, except that it now lives next to a basil plant, which has changed something about it I cannot quite name. Summer is the season for both things, for the slow arrival of the new thing and the slow continuation of the old thing, and the windowsill is where they have agreed to be next to each other for the next four months.