Rocks!!! I love rocks!
When I am working in the garden, walking down a dirt road, by a creek, on the shore, yes just about everywhere, I am looking for "cool rocks". What makes a rock "cool", honestly I don't know. I only know why I think any certain rock is cool.
My interest in rocks started started in early childhood, and really took off when I found a fossil. A very small stone with a a partial shell fossil in it. I thought I had found something grand at the time, and for a different reason, I still do. !
I am glad the the "grown-ups" in my life encouraged me, graciously receiving the white pebbles that were smoothed when tumbled in ancient streams, calling them"lucky stones" . I found an interest that was easy to pursue, and only required my curiosity, rocks, and may-be some something to carry my new found bounty home in. Time spent walking dirt roads, along streams, even digging in the yard, have the added bonus of a new treasure, well sometimes.
A strong and mystical feeling of understanding and kinship, to Mother Earth abides. Stones make up her bones, hold the history and autobiography in written in layers of stone, fossils laid down, mountains heaved up, and sculpted from water, glazed by volcanoes and jumbled by earthquakes over a time so vast it is hard to even imagine. On our way home from vacation we one paused to look at the patterns of the earths layers and heaps of stone, I that Is twisted and folded buy the shifting of continent and/or faults zones
For awhile, I lived near where an access road had just been cut thru a hill exposing layers upon layer of shale, which flakes away, rattling down the face of the rocks, just inviting me to look for fossils. Though, I never found even one in my repeated attempts. The curiosity that those well differently colored and textured stones, showed me the vast amounts of time taken to from such a sight.
Rocks are more that the beauty of a gemstone, the record of long ago life, rocks are in large part what soil came from and what it will someday return to, people built their homes from them or in them, think of coal, a rock formed from organic matter , which sometime contains fossils, has been used to heat homes and fire the furnaces that extracted metal from other rocks . I won't go on.
I have rocks all over my home, one is a very smooth stone from the creek, which was wrapped in old socks that could be no longer mended successfully , and for well over a century held the parlor door open. Less that a second to a rock, sorry just had to say that.
