A Landscape That Opened the Heart to Stone
There’s a peculiar magic stitched into the landscape of Pennsylvania. It's not the showy kind of beauty that demands your attention with stark cliffs or theatrical coastlines. No, Pennsylvania’s charm lies in its restraint. The road unwinds through gentle undulations of green, like a lullaby hummed by the earth itself. Hills roll out like time softened into velvet, barns nestle into meadows as if they grew there, and silences are punctuated only by the rhythm of your breath and the turning wheels of your car. Somewhere in those unfolding acres, amid the anonymity of open space and the subtle dignity of heritage towns, I encountered a ring that would come to define a chapter in my life.
The thing about road trips is that they aren’t just about reaching a destination. They unearth something dormant within you. Maybe it’s the altered sense of time, maybe it’s the loosened grip of daily life, or maybe it’s that subtle recalibration of the senses when you’re pulled out of habit and immersed in a new frequency. On this particular drive, the sun seemed to hold its golden hour just a little longer than usual, stretching shadows across the dashboard like ink drawings. The miles between cities weren’t obstacles but invitations, and I found myself increasingly porous to everything—colors, textures, stories, silences.
It was somewhere within this openness that the allure of dendritic agate made its entrance. Not with a bang, but as a slow, creeping enchantment. A mineralogical muse. I’d seen these stones before, admired their branching inclusions and earthy palettes in passing. But admiration is different from resonance. It is one thing to like a stone, another entirely to feel as though it knows you, or that it reflects something you've been trying to articulate without words. The truth is, some objects choose you, not the other way around. They find you when you’re soft enough to listen.
My destination that day was Lancaster, a city that dances between historic charm and subtle modernity, where red brick buildings wear time like a velvet cloak and artisan culture is still very much alive. I was there to meet Amanda and Laura of MaeJean Vintage—two sisters whose names carry quiet reverence in the circles of vintage jewelry lovers. I had followed their work from afar, enchanted by how they gave voice to the pieces they curated, telling stories not just of materials and dates but of sentiment and cultural context. What I didn’t know then was that I would leave their shop forever altered, a new collector's door opened in the mind.
The Ring with a Whispered Past
Their collection was everything I had hoped for and more. Trays of rings arranged like constellations, each orbiting its own history. There were garnets the color of dried blood, opals that flashed like galaxies under skin, lockets with monograms that belonged to long-gone lovers. The whole shop felt like a museum with better lighting and no barriers. But amid this glittering topography, one piece pulled me out of time: a rectangular dendritic agate ring.
At first glance, it was easy to miss. Modest in scale, softly rectangular in silhouette, and encased in a quiet gold bezel. But what it lacked in flamboyance it made up for in depth. The agate was the color of fog-washed earth—taupes, creams, and ashen browns—and inside, delicate black tendrils branched like trees caught mid-winter, or ancient root systems etched by time itself. It was not a ring that performed. It did not beg to be noticed. It asked instead to be contemplated.
I slipped it on and something shifted. It felt less like putting on jewelry and more like reclaiming a part of myself that had been missing. The coolness of the stone, the smoothness of its cabochon surface, the weightlessness that somehow still grounded me—it was alchemical. And perhaps most poignantly, it reminded me of a conversation the night before.
My friend Jenn, a fellow jewelry lover who knows my collection as intimately as her own reflection, had sent me a picture of her new moss agate ring. She’d messaged me from @bellflowerbay with her usual mix of humor and psychic precision: “Can you believe you don’t own one of these yet?” She was right, of course. I had admired them, even pined occasionally, but never acted. Nothing had ever quite sung to me. Until now.
Amanda and Laura, ever the scholars, immediately noted a curious hallmark on the inside of the band: 10k MS. Their curiosity ignited like dry kindling. Within hours, they unearthed the maker—Miller-Steinau, a mid-century jeweler from Portland, Oregon, known for its use of organic American stones like moss agate, rock crystal quartz, and petrified wood. Suddenly the ring was not just a ring. It was a relic, a whisper from another place and time. A convergence of geology, geography, and human artistry.
And isn’t that the true thrill of collecting vintage? The sense that an object is more than adornment—that it is a vessel, a cipher, a fragment of lived experience suspended in metal and stone. A ring becomes a bookmark in the narrative of someone’s life, and when it changes hands, that narrative continues, rewritten, reimagined, and yet faithful to its origin. The past isn’t gone; it just waits in quieter places, like antique shops and roadside towns, for someone to listen.
Dendritic Agate and the Poetry of Impermanence
What I’ve come to love most about dendritic agate is that it is not conventionally beautiful in the way faceted diamonds or fiery opals are. Its appeal is subtle, slow-burning, and utterly meditative. The inclusions—those tree-like dendrites—are formed from iron or manganese trapped within the silica gel of the agate as it hardened over millions of years. They aren’t predictable. They aren’t symmetrical. They are born of chance and pressure, time and mineral memory. They are, in a word, organic.
And perhaps that is why this stone speaks so deeply to certain people. In a culture that prioritizes perfection—clear stones, flawless cuts, symmetry—dendritic agate stands as a kind of rebellion. It is the poetry of impermanence captured in mineral form. Each stone is unique, and not just in pattern but in essence. To wear one is to make peace with imperfection, to acknowledge the beauty in asymmetry, in timeworn texture, in nature’s unrepeatable strokes.
There’s a kind of existential comfort in that. When I wear my Miller-Steinau ring, I feel tethered to the earth in a way that is hard to describe. It reminds me that beauty can come from sediment and pressure, from chaos and stillness. That we, too, are layered beings shaped by the forces around us—our own histories fossilized in emotion rather than crystal. The ring doesn’t just decorate my hand; it converses with it.
It also asks me to slow down. You cannot rush the appreciation of dendritic agate. Its beauty isn’t obvious under fluorescent lighting or through the scroll of a screen. You have to tilt it, let the light play across its surface, observe how the dendrites seem to shift depending on your angle. Like a piece of music that only reveals its full complexity after repeated listens, dendritic agate offers a kind of slow unfolding that rewards stillness and presence.
In an age that champions immediacy and spectacle, this is no small thing. It is an invitation to return to yourself, to pay attention to the small and the silent. To wear such a stone is not to make a statement to others but to reaffirm something within yourself. That you are, perhaps, someone who finds magic in quiet places. Someone who listens.
And so, this Pennsylvania road trip has not only gifted me a ring but a new way of seeing. What began as a casual stop to visit vintage jewelry dealers has become a journey into geological history, American craft, and emotional resonance. I now look at stones differently, not merely as objects of aesthetic pleasure but as repositories of time, memory, and meaning.
This ring, this humble rectangle of dendritic agate, is now the cornerstone of a collection I never set out to build. It is the beginning of a conversation that continues with every piece I discover. And in that way, jewelry becomes not just something you wear, but something you become.
The Sanctity of Discovery: Entering the Halls of Joden
There are places that seem to anticipate your arrival—not because they know you, but because they somehow already reflect who you are. Joden Jewelers in Grove City, Pennsylvania, is one of those places. It doesn’t whisper its significance; it resonates with it. Unlike the quiet intimacy of MaeJean Vintage, Joden feels hallowed. Not in the sense of hushed reverence, but in the grander, more architectural way that speaks to lineage and legacy. You walk in, and time bends just a little. Glass cases stretch across the showroom like altars. Everything glints, not with newness, but with stories.
I arrived there with the fresh memory of Lancaster’s rectangular dendritic agate still pulsing in my palm, unsure whether I was searching or simply wandering. But Joden is not the sort of place you leave unchanged. You don’t just browse there. You descend. Layer by layer, drawer by drawer, into the glimmering strata of jewelry’s past. It is a sanctuary for the tactile historian, the sensorial romantic, the seeker of stones with souls.
Joe, the owner and curator of this trove, greeted us not with salesmanship but with storytelling. He has the rare gift of animating objects without over-explaining them. You listen to him and realize that every gemstone, every band of gold, every forgotten brooch carries not just provenance but personality. Pieces aren’t offered; they are introduced. And it is left to you to decide whether the connection is fleeting or eternal.
In Joe’s presence, the line between artifact and adornment blurs. You begin to understand that wearing vintage jewelry is not about accessorizing. It’s about communing. The ring you slip onto your finger once rested on another hand, beat in rhythm with another life, witnessed another century’s griefs and graces. To wear it now is to inherit a quiet witness. You feel less like an owner and more like a steward.
That day, among trays saturated with Edwardian flourishes and Victorian sentimentality, I found two rings that felt like punctuation marks to the sentence begun in Lancaster. One was an elongated oval, its stone veined with dendrites so faint they seemed to hover just beneath the surface like dreams half-recalled. The other was a slender navette—narrow, contemplative, evocative of crescent moons and chapel windows. Both in gold. Both profoundly subtle. And both felt, somehow, fated.
Kindred in Craft: When Design Speaks Ancestry
There is a certain humility in how dendritic agate shows up in the world. Unlike sapphires or rubies that announce their presence with chromatic brilliance, dendritic agate is whisper-thin in its elegance. It requires a slower eye. Its appeal unfolds like poetry in translation—you must sit with it, let it change you gradually.
The two rings I found in Grove City bore that quiet power. The oval, though larger in surface area, did not dominate the hand. Instead, it extended along the finger like a thought mid-formation. The navette, sharper and more architectural, drew the gaze inward, as if its shape were an arrow pointing toward introspection. Neither dazzled in the conventional sense. Their beauty was in their restraint.
And yet, something deeper tugged at me. A recognition. When I laid these rings beside the rectangular agate from MaeJean, an uncanny continuity emerged—not in stone pattern or bezel design, but in the shoulders. All three shared nearly identical gold shoulders: a gentle rise, a slight swell, the kind of design detail easily overlooked unless you’re attuned to resonance. It was like meeting three strangers who all, somehow, smiled with your mother’s smile.
That visual echo led me down a path of speculation. Could these rings have come from the same maker? It seemed improbable, yet the evidence grew tactile. One of the Grove City pieces—the navette—was stamped 10k MS, the exact same hallmark as the Lancaster ring. Miller-Steinau again. The mark wasn’t shouted from the metal but engraved like a private memory. As if the ring itself wanted you to know, but only if you were willing to ask.
The second Grove City ring, the oval, was even more intriguing. It bore not one but two 10k stamps, each in a different font. An anomaly. A riddle. Was it a transitional piece? A collaborative work? A mistake? These are the questions that make collecting vintage jewelry so endlessly rich. It’s not just about aesthetics. It’s about puzzle pieces scattered across decades, continents, and intentions.
That sense of kinship between rings—despite differences in silhouette or saturation—reminded me that true craftsmanship doesn’t rely on uniformity. It reveals itself in harmony. These rings weren’t identical, but they clearly spoke the same design dialect. Their shapes were variations on a theme, each singing in its own key but following the same melodic line. And that, I realized, is the hallmark of something timeless.
The Epiphany of Intuitive Collecting
It was during the long drive back to Tennessee that the gravity of it all began to settle. Highway miles have a way of elongating thoughts, stretching them across time zones and memory lines. Somewhere between Grove City and home, I glanced at my hand—three dendritic agate rings now keeping quiet vigil—and understood something about myself I hadn’t named before.
These rings were not random acquisitions. They were episodes in an unfolding narrative. My collecting wasn’t driven by trend or scarcity or resale value. It was driven by recognition. A kind of mineral mirroring. These stones, with their inky branches and cloudy translucence, felt like external manifestations of my interior landscape—dreamlike, unresolved, rich with hidden history.
I began to wonder: how often do we recognize ourselves in the objects we keep close? In a world oversaturated with mass production and algorithm-driven taste, is there still space for intuitive collecting? For letting your heart respond before your intellect intervenes?
Dendritic agates do not dazzle. They do not perform. They simply exist—patiently, persistently, beautifully. They reward the one who lingers. And perhaps that’s why I’ve become so drawn to them. They feel like a form of emotional archeology. You don’t just see their patterns. You feel their past.
It’s easy to overlook how emotional collecting truly is. We build our jewelry boxes like we build our memory palaces—stone by stone, moment by moment. Every ring I acquire adds a verse to the poem I didn’t know I was writing. And what this dendritic obsession has taught me is that the most meaningful collections aren’t curated. They are uncovered. Not through force, but through resonance.
These three rings—Lancaster, Grove City oval, Grove City navette—now live side by side in a velvet tray that feels more like an altar than a storage case. I don’t wear them all at once. That would feel cacophonous. Instead, I rotate them based on mood, memory, and the quiet conversations they hold. Sometimes, when I wear the navette, I imagine the artisan who carved its stone into that lunar shape, their hands guided more by intuition than blueprint. Other days, the oval ring reminds me to remain soft, to allow mystery its rightful place in the narrative.
And so, I collect—not for possession, but for communion. These aren’t just rings. They are totems, confidantes, mirrors. They remind me that beauty is not always immediate, that resonance takes time, and that sometimes, the things we’re meant to find will wait for us. Quietly. Faithfully. Until we’re ready.
The Language of Inclusions: Nature’s Handwriting in Stone
To gaze into a dendritic agate is to witness a world within a world—one suspended in a perpetual stillness, as if nature paused her brush mid-stroke. Unlike conventional gemstones that dazzle through color and clarity, dendritic agate speaks in shadows and silhouettes. Its filigree-like inclusions resemble delicate winter branches, ferns pressed into ancient pages, or lightning captured in repose. These formations are not carved or arranged by human hands. They emerge organically from mineral processes—manganese or iron oxides infiltrating chalcedony over millennia—resulting in intricate patterns that feel more like handwriting than geology.
Each stone is a singular expression, a geological soliloquy. And this uniqueness gives dendritic agate its philosophical weight. No two are identical, not even remotely. One ring might hold a formation resembling a tree poised in solitude; another might bloom with rootlike tendrils that seem to stretch beyond the bounds of the bezel. This non-replicable quality renders each piece less like a gem and more like a miniature terrain—a memory map etched in crystal silence.
In a way, these stones feel autobiographical. They’re reminders that beauty isn’t always polished or symmetrical. That meaning often lies in irregularities. That something can be quietly profound without calling attention to itself. Dendritic agate invites us to sit with complexity. To consider that even within what seems like stillness, entire forests may be growing.
I often wonder how many hands, eyes, and breaths passed over these stones before someone saw in them what I now see. How many times were they unchosen for being too muted, too abstract, too hard to pin down? And how often are we like that ourselves—only visible to those who know how to look, to pause, to see beneath the surface? The dendritic patterns, those feathery inclusions, are lessons in slowness. They cannot be rushed into meaning. They require presence, patience, and willingness to perceive nuance.
When you start to wear such a ring, it changes the rhythm of your attention. You begin to notice other slow-beauty objects: the way shadows play across your desk, how steam spirals from your morning mug, how tree bark peels in organic rhythms outside your window. It’s as though the ring becomes a tuning fork for deeper noticing. And through that, it becomes not just adornment, but a meditation.
Identity Reflected in Stone: Why We Choose What We Keep
There is an intimacy in collecting that goes beyond aesthetics. What we gather, what we are drawn to, often reveals the undercurrent of our identity—desires, memories, unresolved curiosities. Dendritic agate, in particular, feels like an emotional mirror. I’ve yet to meet someone who wears it casually. It’s not a stone you choose for sparkle or status. It’s a stone that chooses you through resonance. You put it on, and suddenly, it feels like you’ve worn it for years. It understands something unspoken.
In a culture obsessed with perfection and the surface-level gloss of newness, dendritic agate offers something radically different. It is textured, layered, mysterious. Its patterns do not conform to symmetry. They meander, like thoughts. They fade at the edges, like dreams. To embrace this stone is to embrace a version of self that is not linear, not filtered, not always explicable. It feels like a reclamation of complexity in a world that prefers clarity.
There’s a reason these rings are often bought during transitional periods: after a move, a breakup, a loss, a revelation. They feel like companions for the liminal spaces. Like guardians of becoming. The kind of talismans that don’t necessarily shout “protection” or “power,” but instead whisper “presence.”
And then there’s the matter of memory. One of the more moving realizations I’ve had is that wearing a dendritic agate ring often recalls a place or person without warning. A branch inside the stone might evoke a childhood tree you once climbed. A splay of inclusions may feel oddly familiar—like a landscape remembered from a dream. These aren’t just stones. They are containers of psychic resonance.
That resonance is deeply tied to intuition. I don’t always know why I choose the stones I do. There’s no algorithm or rubric. Sometimes it’s a pull in the chest. Sometimes it’s the way the light strikes at a certain angle. But what I’ve come to understand is this: the rings we keep are often the ones that recognize us before we recognize them. And perhaps that’s the most mystical part of all.
Collecting, then, becomes less about acquisition and more about alignment. It’s a form of self-curation—not of image, but of interiority. Each piece you add to your collection is another sentence in a language only you can read. The agates with their dendritic branching speak not in facts, but in metaphors. They teach you to trust the ineffable.
Ornament as Ode: A Deep Thought on Meaning and Materiality
In a time when the digital realm has rendered everything hyper-visible, hyper-edited, and hyper-consumable, the act of choosing something like dendritic agate is, in itself, a quiet rebellion. These stones are not trendy. They don’t go viral. They don’t lend themselves to fast fashion cycles or influencer campaigns. And yet, they endure. They endure precisely because they are so richly grounded—literally and symbolically—in the natural world.
Let us pause here for a moment to think through what that means in the larger cultural context. In an era of screen fatigue, climate anxiety, and mass commodification, there’s something profoundly healing about grounding ourselves in something that grew in the dark, over time, untouched by human agenda. When you wear a dendritic agate ring, you are wearing a slow history. A whisper from the earth. A reminder that not everything must be fast, new, or flawless to hold value.
And now, the deeper SEO truth, layered not just for search engines but for the seekers who read between lines: dendritic agate rings represent an intersection of philosophy, fashion, and folklore. For those seeking affordable fine jewelry with emotional depth, these pieces are unparalleled. They are not just accessories. They are anchors. They draw from regional American heritage—especially makers like Miller-Steinau, who understood that jewelry could be both beautiful and meaningful. In contrast to generic mass-market items, moss agate and dendritic agate rings offer wearers an artifact of story and spirit.
There is something delightfully subversive about choosing to collect rings that feel personal rather than performative. You’re not buying them to be seen—you’re buying them to feel something. They are not aspirational in the conventional sense. They’re contemplative. And that difference matters.
In the end, what dendritic agate teaches—if we are listening—is that meaning isn’t always loud. That ornament can be both wild and quiet. That the best things grow slowly, form beneath pressure, and emerge not for spectacle but for communion. These rings are not placeholders. They are thresholds. Every time you look down at one, you remember who you were when you found it—and more importantly, who you were becoming.
So here we are, several rings in. A journey through geography and gemology. A series of encounters that feel more like reunions. Each dendritic ring now a line in a longer poem. And I, the writer, the wearer, the witness.
The Rings That Remember: Traveling with Memory on the Hand
Jewelry often masquerades as ornament, but sometimes it is far more than that. It becomes a form of personal cartography—an atlas of emotions, places, and people transcribed not on paper, but in metal and stone. Each time I slip on one of my dendritic agate rings, I am not simply completing an outfit. I am summoning a memory. A roadside shop cloaked in quiet reverence. A long conversation over velvet trays and antique glass cases. A particular afternoon sun cutting diagonally through a store window. These rings do not simply glitter; they hum. They are saturated with place.
There’s a peculiar intimacy in this kind of adornment. It’s not about acquisition. It’s about recognition. These pieces are not purchased; they are met, as if in a kind of synchronicity. One ring calls forth Lancaster—the crisp air, the early fog, the way Amanda and Laura spoke about each artifact as if it held a pulse. Another ring brings me back to Grove City—Joe’s lyrical retelling of how each piece arrived, his ability to animate even the simplest band with lineage and luster. They are not just shops. They are repositories of memory, echo chambers for the stories we carry and those we’ve yet to tell.
When I wear them, I do not feel accessorized. I feel accompanied.
The act of donning one is ceremonial in its own quiet way. You glance into your jewel box not for decoration but for resonance. You ask, which memory do I want near today? Which fragment of my own becoming feels right to cradle on my hand? This kind of wearing is not passive. It is participatory. It is communion.
And in that moment—when the ring touches skin—it ceases to be an object. It becomes a witness.
When Provenance and Soul Intertwine: The Quiet Alchemy of Collecting
Great jewelry houses and collectors often speak of provenance as a kind of pedigree—a traceable line of ownership that authenticates value. But for the poet-hearted among us, provenance is less about ownership and more about soul. It’s the essence that a piece carries through time. It’s the way it remembers the neck it once graced, the hand it once circled, the drawer it once rested in between decades. In vintage collecting, this invisible inheritance becomes the real sparkle.
Amanda and Laura at MaeJean Vintage understand this intimately. Their entire practice is one of reverent restoration. Every piece is researched, contextualized, gently revived—not to be resold quickly, but to be rehomed thoughtfully. They know that each ring is not just a remnant of another era’s taste, but a portal. Their trays are not full of things; they’re full of stories waiting to be chosen again. Their stewardship of jewelry feels less like business and more like literary curation. They don’t just match people to rings. They guide you toward the one that already belongs to you.
Joe at Joden Jewelers operates with similar grace but from a different angle. His encyclopedic knowledge of gemology, settings, styles, and makers could easily intimidate. But instead, he invites. He speaks not from the pedestal of expertise, but from the wellspring of love. Each ring he shows you is accompanied by a tale, a theory, a rumor, or a well-documented history. The hours I spent with him did not feel transactional. They felt ancestral. As if we were not shopping but engaging in an age-old rite—one where beauty is chosen not for its shine, but for its soul.
This is the alchemy of true collecting. You are not simply gathering beautiful things. You are entering into a reciprocal relationship. The ring asks for care, for storytelling, for attention. And in return, it offers companionship, legacy, and in some strange, wondrous way, self-knowledge.
People often ask why I choose vintage. Why not simply buy new, design custom, or follow trends? The answer is layered, but it always comes back to this: I want to wear something that has already lived. I want its texture to hold time. I want it to feel like it knows something I don’t yet know. That it’s been waiting for me to catch up.
The Symbiosis of Wearing: When Rings Become Biography
There is a saying—old, worn, repeated into cliché—that we do not own jewelry, it owns us. But I think that phrase misses the nuance. It implies possession, dominance, a kind of imbalance. What I have found instead is symbiosis. A mutual recognition between wearer and worn. These rings did not demand anything from me. They did not impose their presence. They waited.
They waited through glass cases and time zones, through other hands that passed them by, through eras where their quiet forms were perhaps too quiet. They waited until someone walked in who could hear their frequency. And when that person was me, they whispered.
That is how real jewelry finds its home. Not with fanfare, but with familiarity. It speaks in silence and symmetry. In emotional geometry.
These three dendritic agate rings—each different in cut and character, each plucked from a different corner of Pennsylvania—now reside not just in my possession, but in my narrative. They are not statements. They are sonnets. They tell not of trends but of terrain—literal and psychological. When I wear them, I feel stitched to the land that offered them to me. I feel stitched to the versions of myself who found them—curious, open, and somehow changed.
And that is perhaps the deepest truth about jewelry that becomes biography. It is not about material worth. It is about emotional architecture. About wearing a form that once sat quietly in the earth and now lives on your body like a vow. A vow to remember, to feel, to honor.
In a time when much of what we buy is disposable, these rings remind me what it means to carry something enduring. They are the opposite of impulse. They are the embodiment of slow love.
And so, my jewel box no longer feels like a collection. It feels like a living text. Each compartment holds a chapter. Each ring, a line. These dendritic agate pieces are my newest entries—full of road maps, rainfall, and regional dialects of craftsmanship. They are whispering hills, shared laughter in antique stores, and the sacred act of being seen by something silent.
Conclusion: Stones That Speak, Roads That Remember
Some journeys gift you more than photographs or souvenirs. They leave you altered, quietly, like time reshaping the edge of a river. This Pennsylvania road trip began as a casual exploration and unfolded into something far deeper—a pilgrimage of intuition, artistry, and elemental beauty. The dendritic agate rings I found were not simply items to collect; they were revelations in stone, each carrying the texture of place and the tone of personal transformation.
From Lancaster’s quiet elegance to Grove City’s grand storytelling, every stop became a verse in a larger poem—about presence, about patience, and about the unexpected ways beauty enters our lives. In the inky branches inside each agate, I found metaphors for memory, for individuality, for the unseen connections that bind us to objects and to each other.
These rings are no longer just jewelry. They are cartographies of emotion, repositories of lived experience. They ground me in the knowledge that the most resonant pieces of our lives often come quietly, unannounced, and wait for us to notice them. They ask not to be flaunted, but felt.
And so, the jewel box grows. Not with acquisitions, but with echoes. Each ring, a soft-spoken reminder that meaning is not found in spectacle but in stillness. That value resides not only in craftsmanship but in connection. That sometimes, a stone can say everything you’ve never been able to put into words.
This wasn’t just a road trip. It was a return—to slowness, to self, to story. And in the end, the rings didn’t just find me. They remembered me. And I, in turn, will never forget them.