This messy pile may not look like much, but I know these faces and they hold a lot of meaning for me. I can’t believe I never made the connection before, but during this trip home, it hit me: both sets of my grandparents collected large and interesting rocks and fossils and kept them in a rock pile in their respective yards. As a kid I played in these well-appointed and well-maintained rock-piles and knew many of these rocks as individuals with distinct personalities.
My maternal grandfather died more than 20 years ago, and it changed the landscape. No one could care for that land like he did. As I grew older and stopped playing in the rocks, and the land was managed less meticulously, the rocks were buried under years of leaves-turned-to-soil and the grasses that came to grow there.
After the death of my paternal grandmother, just about 4 years back, some of her rocks came to live on this land in their own small pile. Perhaps it was seeing them there, a novel recent addition to the landscape, that reawakened my interest in the old rock-pile and helped me realize that my connection to rocks comes from both sides of my family tree.
So I dug out one earthy side of the rock pile and was surprised to see old friends looking back at me. Rocks that I used to know as singular individuals by their shape, texture, and markings were still there waiting for me to find after all these years.
There wasn’t time to clean out the whole rock pile on this trip, but I don’t know that that’s what was most needed right now. I think, more importantly, my work was to reconnect to treasured things forgotten and realize that the love of rocks I’ve had since childhood wasn’t born in a vacuum, but that I come from a line of ancestors who also found wonder and awe in noticing rocks and loved to bring them home to live with and appreciate.
Meanwhile, these rocks still lay under years of plant-matter. They are no longer forgotten, just waiting in slumber until it’s time to wake them up again.