Liz Hartley

Photo Sergei Kamenskikh via Dreamstime

If my mother hadn’t been in such a nesting mood and decided to wash walls in the weeks before she was due to deliver me, I would have been born in May, not April. My birthstone would have been emerald, not diamond.

Perhaps my near-May miss was why I always had a burning desire to own an emerald, although you can probably chalk part of it up to the Wizard of Oz and his Emerald City. When I first fell into the jewelry business, that was almost my first order of business: see and own a real emerald!

So it was with a crushing sense of disappointment that I saw my first emerald. It was kind of dull, yellowish green, not a pretty emerald green. And it wasn’t clear. It had stuff in it. I could not imagine what all the hype had been about.

Completely turned me off emeralds. I still watched Dorothy and friends every chance I got, but I thought the Wizard had a lot to answer for.

Since then, however, I’ve been privileged to see some breathtakingly spectacular emeralds, including some early stones mined and cut in Colombia that had lain drowned in the Caribbean for hundreds of years. (More on that another time.)

So I’ve reversed my opinion. Emeralds truly do deserve their place among the big five gemstones. (These are emeralds, rubies, sapphires, diamonds and pearls. I always include pearls although some don’t. In fact, in my book, pearls are probably the greatest gemstone in the world. More about that, too, another time.) However, the emeralds that earn that top spot have always been, and will always be, far beyond my budget. Although I can never own one, at least in the quality I would enjoy, I can and do enjoy seeing fine emeralds whenever I can.

For those lucky enough to have mothers who delivered in this fair month, enjoy your lovely stone!