There was nothing I wanted to do less on such a beautiful Summer day than housework, but I had been assigned a list of tasks by my parents, and I decided that the sooner I did them, the better.

My first job was to help Mom clean out the car. She'd pulled the car as close to the porch as possible to that the cord from the vacuum would reach.

My Dad had been away for some time. I hadn't been told where he want and at that age had been somewhat oblivious to such concerns.

It was while emptying out some contents from under the seat that Mom discovered a box she'd left in the car and forgotten about.

"What is it?" I asked.

She opened the box to reveal inside a silver ring with a red stone, and a gold locket. "These belonged to my Mother and Father," she said. "After your grandfather died, we found them inside his study. Your Grandmother told me that he'd wanted you to have these, but whenever you came to visit it always escaped his mind, so she told me to give them to you. It's a good thing we found them, I almost forgot too."

I picked up the ring and the locket and examined them.

"That's your Grandfather's high school graduation ring," she said. "The locket is actually one that I bought for your Grandmother as a gift when I was around your age."

Built into a tree on the front lawn, there was a treehouse which had been built out of pieces of an old wooden fence, weathered and gray, and the floor sometimes felt as if it was unsturdy and might give way, but sometimes I would retreat there to take a break from the housework.

The sunlight gleamed through the gaps in the fence, making the pieces of jewelry shimmer.

I had an empty coffee can nearby, and it was into here that I placed the ring and the locket for safekeeping.

Work around the house was boring, so when I was asked to go to pick up a prescription from the pharmacy inside the hospital a few blocks away, I eagerly accepted the chance to get away from the house, and had no intention of returning quickly.

It was an old hospital. There was a mustiness to it that no disinfectant could fully dispense with. A marble floor of white speckled gray tiles curved up to the walls with smooth black baseboards. The walls were a faded white and there were carved patterns in the wooden doorframes painted white. Some paint chips dotted the floor.

Walking down a hallway, I ran into Larry, a classmate. Like myself, he had been sent to the hospital on an errand, to drop off a care package for a sick relative. I told him about the ring the the locket, and he became eagerly interested to see them. Perhaps it wasn't so much the appeal of seeing them so much as the opportunity for something to do to kill boredom.

Larry started to walk toward the entrance where we came in earlier, but I told him I knew a shortcut. This turned out to be a mistake, however, as we soon found ourselves lost in a labyrinth of hallways. The hospital had begun many years earlier as a small clinic, but over the years had been built into a large hospital. Each new addition over the years was vastly different than the pre-existing structure, so that one might walk through a door or round a corner to find themselves in what might just as well be a different building. For some people, this made is easier to find their way around, but for others it was intolerably confusing.

I walked through a doorway, Larry close behind, into an L-shaped corner where the hallway continued to the left, and to the right there was an old window with a metal frame and square panes of glass.

As I turned left into the room, I saw that there was a shallow pool, blue and smelling of chlorine. It seemed as if might have perhaps been used for some therapeutic purpose. The people in the people were of endless variety, men, women, young and old.

Placed all around the pool were personal objects which the people had brought with them.

I walked toward one of the people in the pool, a brown-haired young woman, sitting relaxedly, as if she were in a spa, her againsta wall of tiny ceramic tiles.

"Excuse me," I said, to which she opened her eyes and looked up at me. "What are all these people doing here?"

"We come here to be cleansed," she said calmly.

"What's all this stuff around the pool?"

"We bring our belongings here to be cleansed also." Upon saying this, she calmly closed her eyes again and leaned her head back to the wall.

After some time, we found our way to an exit, and went back to the treehouse. I opened the coffee can and showed Larry the contents. It seemed, however, that having was not as pleasing a thing as wanting, since he seemed disappointed that the ring and the locket were not what he pictured in his mind.

"Maybe you should take these to the pool, to be cleansed," he said.

I smiled and put them back in the coffee can. "Not today."