(Side note: today we booked an Airbnb in Rincón, Puerto Rico for September! Stay tuned for our travelogue in Week 34!)
To this point, the things we have downsized have been relatively easy. The attic is empty, and the closets are (mostly) empty. But this week, we downsized some sentimental items that felt much larger than anything we’ve downsized so far. The space they took up in our home was very small, but the symbolic space they took up was massive.
The wedding dress
This is the easiest one to wrap your heads around. The wedding dress was an amazing symbol of our marriage. I LOVED that dress and honestly, I wish there was a tradition where wives wear their wedding dresses every year on their anniversary. I would totally do that (after a visit to a tailor to let it out a bit, obviously).
After the wedding, my mom thoughtfully took the dress and had it pressed and preserved in a beautiful box so that our daughters could wear it one day. It was a lovely sentiment, but those of you who know our children know that there is no scenario where any of them would want to wear my dress for their wedding.
If we weren’t keeping it for them, there was really very little reason to keep it at all. So…what to do with it? I asked Google what to do with an old wedding dress, and found out about angel gowns. It turns out, there are groups of amazing women who accept donated wedding dresses, cut them up, and turn them into burial gowns (angel gowns) for stillborn babies.
I mean, that was that.
I cannot think of a better way for that dress to be used and I am honored to be able to donate a dress to their cause. If you would like to donate, either a dress or a financial donation, you can find them at https://restinhisarms.com/#ways-to-give
Our wedding rings
These are less obvious of a downsize, right? Rings take up no room at all. They live on your finger and where you go, your finger goes. Sort of…
Have you ever seen those trees that are surrounded by a metal fence and, over time, the tree just grows right through the fence? My finger was the tree and my rings were the fence. They wouldn’t come off anymore and no amount of butter or oil would make it happen.
As we discussed traveling lighter, these rings were starting to feel more like a weight than a symbol of love. I knew they would need to come off eventually, so why not now? We have a good friend who is a firefighter and they have a tool they use to cut rings from patient’s fingers. He graciously agreed to cut them off for us.
Cutting them off wasn’t easy. They ended up coming off in pieces. I had been on the fence about what to do with them, but the way they came off made that decision easy. Getting them repaired and resized was more effort and money than we wanted to put into them.
Selling them seemed like the most logical option. But in the condition they were in, selling them would be difficult unless we could find someone who could either repair them or separate the diamonds from the gold and purchase the pieces rather than the whole.
We found Diamond Banc in Kansas City and decided to give them a try. We set up an appointment and brought all four of my wedding bands and Gene’s wedding ring as well. He has been wearing a silicone band for years. I literally had to dig his actual wedding ring out of the back corner of his nightstand drawer.
In our meeting with them we found out that the current natural diamond market is not great, thanks to the popularity of lab made diamonds. She offered to take the gold (which we couldn’t do anything with in its current condition anyway), and to remove the diamonds so we could save them. That is something we actually could see one of our kids wanting in the future.
So we left with a decent check for the gold that we thought had no value, and a small bag of eight loose diamonds that will live in a safe deposit box until we decide what to do with them. All in all, it was a perfect outcome. We get to save the parts of the ring that had sentimental value to us while letting go of the parts that were weighing us down.
Moving on
My current wedding band is one I found in a Costa Rican gift shop for five dollars. Gene’s is a silicone one that can be replaced on Amazon for less than ten bucks. If either of us lose them, the world won’t end. We’ll just pop into a gift shop and find a new one.
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