Bedrock

“Everybody needs a rock,” claims Byrd Baylor in one of my favorite children’s books. It would appear that I need more than just one. I have a whole dish of rocks that I keep beside my bed, each one from a particular place and time in my life. Smooth-washed beach stones from Lake Superior, angular granite from a mountain in Colorado, a piece of petrified wood from Oregon. So far, given my wandering lifestyle, I’ve restricted my collecting to pocket-sized pebbles that are easily packed.

But when I visited my friend Emily in Boston this past June, she was assembling a teaching collection of rocks to share with her Montessori students, and she needed larger samples. I offered to find her a piece of Virginia schist, which is how a chunk of sparkly-gold rock got tucked under the seat of my car and made its way across state lines. The other day, Maisie and I walked down to the bay so I could hunt up another rock type for the collection—a piece of Michigan limestone full of fossil shells.

Before mailing the package off to Emily, I set the two rocks side by side to admire them. Metamorphic schist and sedimentary limestone, one forged from intense heat and pressure and the other deposited slowly at the bottom of a sea. Here they are: The bedrock of my old and new lives.