A Friendship Across Decades

Something changes when friendship crosses into decades.

Maya and I met at Cranbrook Academy of Art in fall 2005, and our lives have spiraled around each other ever since—two studio artists on opposite coasts whose paths keep quietly, insistently intersecting. We became jewelers, wives, mothers, writers. We were diagnosed with cancer in different Novembers. Brown and white, tall and short, curly and straight.

But the real bond lives in the untitled: the way we both gather stray natural objects and arrange them on big white surfaces for months at a time. At first it feels like writing. Over time, it becomes reading.

And yes—gold bangles. We both love those, too.

All year we ship things back and forth: jewelry, chocolate, pressed leaves, found stones. And once a year Maya brings herself—and her expanded jewelry collection—across the country to Morristown. This time she's also arriving as a poet-in-residence at the San Francisco Public Library, carrying that part of her practice east as well.