Jenny Lyn Smith received some unexpected mail a few weeks ago: a silver bracelet she made more than 30 years ago had arrived back in Haines.
But how – and what happened to it over the past three decades – remains somewhat of a mystery.
The bracelet was lost on its way to a Sitka jeweler in 1990. Smith, an artist who has lived in Haines for 50 years, forgot about it for three decades. Then a photo appeared in a Northwest Coast artists’ Facebook group a few weeks ago. Someone was trying to identify the maker of a silver bracelet with a frog design that had Smith’s initials engraved on it.
Celia Dumag, who has been Sitka’s postmaster for 22 years, said the bracelet was in a watchbox in her office. She first noticed it years ago but didn’t know what it was. She said she doesn’t remember exactly when she saw it for the first time. “It was apparently loose in the mail,” she said.
Lost items usually are sent to the U.S. Post Office’s mail recovery center in Atlanta, Georgia. But for a reason Dumag didn’t know, the bracelet never left the Sitka Post Office. Earlier this year – several weeks ago, but Dumag doesn’t remember when – she was organizing her office and decided to figure out what was in the box. She found the bracelet inside, and posted a photo of it on Facebook, hoping to track down the artist.
“I could tell that I had made it in 1990. I never thought anything else (of it),” Smith said, referring to the moment she saw the photo. The bracelet has a standard design – she’s made dozens of the same kind, and she hadn’t remembered that one of them had been lost in 1990.
Then she got a call from Genevieve Bell at the post office. A special piece of mail had arrived from Sitka.
At first Smith thought it was a different lost item she’d made: a ring, with gold, that vanished on its way to a customer in New Jersey. But it was the bracelet she had seen on Facebook. The Sitka postmaster had found it. Smith said it’s worth $400.
“I don’t know if it was in one of their bags behind a cabinet, or what. But I vaguely remember that someone I used to sell to had said there was a bracelet missing from the order that I had done (30 years ago),” Smith said. “At the time I had three kids in school. I was a mom. I was doing artwork. And my husband had a business. So I had thought that I misplaced (the bracelet) or didn’t put it in the box, or that I had sent it to someone else. I promptly forgot about it. I remember telling the (buyer) to just subtract it (from the invoice).”
When Dumag learned it was Smith, she called Bell at the post office in Haines, who confirmed Smith lives here, and mailed it back to where it all started.
“I went and polished it up. It has maybe a couple of scratches but it has never been worn. It was rattling around somewhere,” Smith said.
Now Smith plans on selling it. ” I’ve had a couple of people ask,” she said. “It has a story.”
Smith hopes the lost ring, a wrap-around with a lovebird design, turns up, too. It was scanned in Juneau but never made it to New Jersey.
“This bracelet, when I sell it, will cover the cost of that ring,” Smith said.