"Trove" Gold Ring Giveaway

Thirty-four summers ago, I found this 14k gold ring with four tiny rhinestones in the port of Hydra. I was in an outdoor café drinking sludgy Greek coffee when the ring glistened up at me from the ground. I took it to the closest jewelry shop and asked what it was worth. The guy weighed it and told me in Greek Drachma it was the equivalent of $150.00. He offered to buy it from me for the gold, but despite needing money to keep travelling, I never considered it.

I had been spending a lazy summer on Hydra where my Uncle Charlie built a house that he still owns. Leonard Cohen was a neighbor, and if you see the new movie Marianne & Leonard, much of it is set on the small Saronic Gulf island (my uncle’s house is in several shots) where Leonard and Marianne met and lived and loved in a community of free-spirited artists in the 60s. Hydra is magical, sexy, inspiring, wild, and otherworldly. It’s one of my favorite earthly places.

My uncle isn’t Greek, but he and my Aunt Marcie moved to Athens to teach English at the American school, something I would end up doing decades later in Japan and Luxembourg. So, my three cousins grew up in Greece, attending school there and raising hell, as they once told me.

But then my Aunt Marcie died when my cousins were teenagers, and, as a way to heal, my uncle and his kids built this house on top of a high hill on Hydra. There are no cars on the island, just donkeys to get your suitcase or building supplies up the hundreds of shallow white stairs. In fact, when my uncle bought the rocky property for about 10K, it was just a stone wall with a skinny donkey living behind it. The donkey became part of the family and would continue to live beside the house for years.

In 1985, just three weeks after my father died, I left for a junior year abroad in London. At the end of the four months, I went to Greece and spent 6 weeks on Hydra in that whitewashed villa on the cliff. My sister, Betsy, and some friends also came for a few weeks. I invited Mark to join me (we had dated in college, and he was also doing a semester in Europe), instead he returned to New Haven—and still has regrets about it.

That summer, without Mark there, I spent much of my time discovering the beauty of Hydra, and in the process, unearthed a passion for writing. I fell for a dodgy Australian cliff diver who wore a ratty pink tee-shirt covered with about 25 expressions using the word “fuck.” And I wrote an essay about him in a college creative writing class the following fall.

I’m remembering Hydra most vividly these days because of the new Leonard Cohen movie. I’ve had a life-long connection with Leonard, saw him in concert twice, read the lyrics to “Dance Me to the End of Love” at my wedding, and adore that, at least in spirit, Leonard and I share Hydra.

In exactly two months from today on 9-19-19 my memoir, Trove: A Woman’s Search for Truth and Buried Treasure will be published by Brown Paper Press, and I have been happily selecting small treasures from my own trove of found things to send to people who preordered the book. I’m also putting together one special treasure for an online hunt. But this one Hydra treasure–I’ve been holding onto it.

I have worn this ring hundreds of times. For a few years, it was the only nice piece of jewelry that I owned, and I always put it on for special occasions like my college graduation, friends’ weddings, and fancy dates.

I haven’t worn the ring in ages, because my fingers are now taken up with my sapphire wedding ring (Mark’s great grandfather won it in a side bet in a poker match) and—more recently—a new antique sterling ring my friend Holloway gave me because the amber glass stone matched my book cover. At first I couldn’t accept it, but she reminded me we don’t need to hold on to jewelry that we don’t wear and someone else might love.

So, I’m excited for this special gold ring from Hydra to be my next giveaway. I’ll randomly choose one person from the next 200 readers who subscribe to my mailing list on my website, SandraAMiller.com, and then I’ll send the ring off to the winner. Or, if you have already signed up, just leave a comment below and I’ll add your name to the drawing.

I can’t wait to pass this ring on to one of you, and hope that it brings you some of the transformative magic that I experienced all those years ago when I—a 20-year-old girl with a flowy white dress, a choppy London haircut, and new dream of writing—found it on a Greek island.

Sign up here for a chance to “catch” the gold ring.

You can use one of these links to preorder my memoir Trove, through Amazon or Brown Paper Press.