I have a pair of earrings. They are clip-on earrings since I do not have pierced ears. They have gold colored backs, and a bright yellow enamel circle with matching white enamel petals on the front. The daisies are about the size of a quarter. And the hinged mechanism on the back is the size of a fingernail.

I first found these earrings in my mom’s jewelry box. She had a collection of earrings, both clip-ons and regular ones, since her previously pierced ears had long since closed up. This was about three or four years ago, when my sister pierced her ears and asked my mom to borrow some old earrings. My mom keeps her jewelry in boxes at the back of a drawer. She likes to hold onto everything, and I found several old beaded bracelets and necklaces that I had made for her as a little kid. This led to an afternoon of the three of us digging through lots of old jewelry with varying degrees of value and patina.

My sister found the earrings she was looking for, but I also found the daisy earrings. I really like anything with flowers on it, so I was pretty excited about this. They were also clip-ons so I could wear them, despite not having pierced ears. My mom had not worn them in years, and was happy to see someone using them again, so she gave them to me.

I just assumed that they were bought by my mom, and she wore them for a while before they found a home deep within the jewelry box. However, I soon found out that this was not quite what happened. Once when I was wearing them she informed me that my aunt would be so happy to see someone wearing her earrings. I was not very surprised by this, since many of the sets of old clothes and jewelry came from my aunt. She was a fashion major at FIT, and my mom has a box of “dress up” clothes filled with all the bright and colorful things she sewed as a student there.  

Again, I assumed that was the end of the story; that she had bought them, and then later given them to my mother, but a few weeks ago I went to visit her, I happened to be wearing the earrings. When she first saw them, she did not remember them, but told me that she really liked my earrings. Then she realized that they were familiar, and asked me if they were the ones that she used to wear. I told her they were, and she said that she got them from my grandmother. Unfortunately she did not know where my grandma had gotten them, and there is nobody else who I can ask. She definitely remembered my grandma wearing them, and then giving them to her. Then my aunt passed them on to my mom.

While they do not have any identifying marks, I found a few Etsy shops that sold identical and similar pairs. However all of them identified them as merely “Retro Daisy Earrings”, and only one shop indicated them as being from the 1970s. Most of the shops also seemed to be reselling thrifted items, and did not actually know anything about the items themselves.

While I would like to believe that my grandmother had inherited them from a long chain of relatives, I believe that they are from the 70s, which means that she could not have had them for more than five or ten years before giving them to my aunt. Perhaps they were a gift from my grandfather, or her cousins in Connecticut. The exact origins of this object has been lost to time, but it is nice to know that so many women in my family share my fondness for flowers.