I lost my diamonds in the Dead Sea.
That’s a sentence I never thought I’d utter. And it turns out not to be true. But for a while, I thought I’d lost my diamonds in the Dead Sea. The diamonds that adorn my wedding ring are so small that when I emerged from the water of the Dead Sea after having covered myself in mud, as tourists do, I looked down at the ring and noticed with some alarm that it appeared very different. The sparkle was gone. I panicked.
Did the diamonds corrode off? Were they floating (or sinking) somewhere in that vast ancient sea? After thinking about it a moment, calculating how much it would cost to replace the wedding ring, I began to imagine those tiny diamonds floating off into the water and taking on new life there. And I found the thought strangely comforting. They’d come from the ground; let them go back to the ground. Earth to earth; dust to water.
