Box of Rocks

I moved a few years ago from Arkansas to Florida, so I looked at that as a time to clean out the boxes that were gathering dust in my attic. I found items from my childhood, diaries from when I was a teenager, study manuals from Navy boot camp, but the most interesting thing I found were rocks. In the bottom of several boxes, there were rocks. There were funny looking rocks, rocks that I clearly suckered a parent into buying me from an overpriced museum gift shop, and rocks that I had not the slightest clue as to where they may have been picked up. There were a few seashells rolling around in the bottom of those boxes also.

I sat in my garage in the sweltering summer Arkansas heat and thought about rocks. I've always been the type of person that when walking along, keeps one eye on where I am going, but also one eye on the ground, because you just never know when you will see something that should be picked up. I guess I've had this fascination with the fossils of the earth since I was a kid. I had never really thought about it before, but then I did recall that trip to a castle in Wales. I was wandering around the grounds of this perfect Welsh castle and there was a pile of rocks. I remember looking left, looking right and plunking a piece of that castle in my purse. That rock sits today on my home office desk with a picture of the castle.

Now that I live in Florida I obsess not only over the rocks, but the seashells! I have glass containers of them all over the house, I think it's a requirement for living near the sea. I'm borderline selfish when it comes to shells also. My mother came to visit this past Thanksgiving and we took a stroll on the beach one day after lunch. I brought my trusty bucket and proceeded to barge ahead of the group to be the first person to get all the great shells. Only later did I realize that was kind of selfish, and I gave up a portion of my loot to my mom. I did keep all the sharks teeth and sea glass though.

Even though My Life with Seashells was born today, out of the land of Blogger, My Life with Seashells began a few decades ago. I've recently hit the first significant milestone in my life that has made me step back and think about what is most important to me, what matters most, and what I want the next few decades to look like.

As the sea shapes and smooths the rocks and the glass and the shells, I will shape this next and new exciting chapter in my life.