I dreamed that I was newly engaged, and shopping for rings. We were in Australia, and had to take a helicopter to the jewelry store. It was remote and hard to get to, br it was the closest one, and it was world famous.
We flew across a desert flat spotted with a few sparse, dark green trees, then over a bare, bone pale karst highland. Finally, we wove through jagged peaks of rust red streaked with ochre gold to land in a tawny landscape, dry and dusty, with a few palm trees clustered around an oasis spring, and a large red clay building that was the jewelry store.
I had brought two small sapphires I had from my grandmother, mounted in a mock-up of a ring design I’d come up with. I wanted to have them flanking a slightly larger center stone, nothing too big, and NOT a diamond. The ring would be in platinum, and would be molded such that the prongs holding the stones wouldn’t just stick out of the band, but would sweep out of it like little blades of grass bending up around flowers.
The salesperson we had our appointment with took one look at my design and completely vetoed it as too plain and dowdy for their store to be associated with. She tried instead to sell us a ring from a collection of mixed yellow and red gold, where fans and frills of thin golden strips swept up from the bands, like butterfly wings, or the swirling fin of an ornamental goldfish, or a sailfish sail. I was not at all interested, as I wanted something small and low profile. So we left.
We were planning to stay for a few days in the town, so I gave it some thought, and we went back the next day with no appointment, just to browse the store. I decided I did like their signature red and yellow gold streaked metal. It was unique, and echoed the mountains around the town. I thought maybe a delicate band with a few very small rubies might be nice. But when we walked in, the first ruby rings we saw were huge stones set in platinum. To me they looked an awful lot like the ring the sales lady had said they wouldn’t make. I was going to keep looking, but then I woke up.
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