One of the many things about me that endears me to the Man is my collection of rocks that are scattered throughout the Farm.  He enjoys gently chiding me about them, that there are too many and they fill up every flat space available.  To the untrained eye, they may appear to be just rocks of all shapes and sizes, textures and colors.  But to me, each stone represents a memory.  I have some large, rounded pieces of lava from a beach in Hawaii, and I can still hear the sound of them being tumbled around by the force of the waves. I can close my eyes, and I am back on that beach with the Man, holding hands and feeling like kids.

Some of my favorite rocks have come from our time spent in Sedona.  There is the rock on a shelf in my study with the large vein of copper running through it, which we found in an old copper mine during a snow storm.  On another shelf sits a large, weathered piece of “red rock”, found while the Man and I were fishing for catfish under a massive cottonwood.  On my desk are two colorful pieces of agate, one blue, one red, that I found when we stopped in the lowlands to admire a field of blooming cactus. Geodes, petrified wood, and a few fossils also have their place in the Farm.

To me, a rock will never fade like a photo- graph, or get fuzzy like a memory.  It never changes, and will always be like it was at the moment it was found.  It is texture, something you can hold, and even smell.  And they all remind me of time spent with the Man…