Brass Peacock

An heirloom finds a new calling

The scissors in the bottom of Ruth’s fanny pack didn’t blend in with their neighbors. The peacock that made the finger loop seemed to look down its beak at the pack of American Spirits. The iPhone stood in stark contrast, and both items emphasized each other’s age. Ruth’s oldest possession and her newest bumping against each other as she made her way down the path to the beach. The elaborate scissors were about the same size as any pair of common kitchen shears, though, as with any heirloom, they seemed to weigh more than the sum of the atoms in the raw brass that made them up. Ruth was acutely aware of their presences in her fanny pack with each step down the sandy walkway.
In 1942 Ruth’s grandmother Lucy had been given the peacock scissors as an engagement gift by a patient she’d cared for at the hospital where she worked. When the patient, a once boisterous telephone operator at the end of her life, had heard of Lucy’s engagement to the shy man with dark hair who’d been shipped over to Europe the previous spring, she handed Lucy the keys to her house and told her to look in the top right drawer of her dresser. Standing in this woman’s empty house, looking down at the dresser and feeling like she was definitely breaking at least a couple rules, Lucy had retrieved the scissors with something like holy reverence. “They’re for snipping the last thread when you finish making your wedding dress” said the operator when Lucy had returned with tears in her eyes.
Ruth’s mother had also used them for that purpose. They weren’t a family of tailors, but through the generations the women in Ruth’s family had kept up a tradition of making their own wedding dresses based off an old pattern that drifted in and out of fashion as the years went by. As a child, Ruth was always fascinated by the peacock scissors, the ruby eyes that were still intact, the way the tail feathers seemed so fragile even though they weren’t. That her mother forbade the use of the scissors for anything other than their expressed purpose of cutting the final thread on a wedding dress only added to their allure.
On Ruth’s 40th birthday her mother had sent her the peacock scissors in the mail without any explanation. She had given up on pestering Ruth about her love life and when she was going to settle down, and the silent gesture seemed to concede defeat. Ruth was happy with her life and saw the scissors as a kind of trophy, though she couldn’t seem to make herself use them.
On the morning of her trip to the beach her regular kitchen scissors had broken at the handle, and instead of bringing a knife to take care of the plastic rings that kept the six pack of Coors Light together she dug out the peacock. Ruth, like most people she knew, took great relish in cutting the plastic six pack rings so they wouldn’t strangle a sea bird or something, and now sitting at the beach with her friends and her dog she saw the birth of a new tradition. One bird frees another.