We lived on a farm. The river bottom land was good farming land but the house and outbuildings and corrals were on upper rocky ground, rounded river rock. Big and little rocks made up the surface layer. Underneath was a thin layer of dirt that would quickly erode away in the infrequent summer downpours leaving another surface layer of rocks. This was the desert country of south-western New Mexico I can’t imagine what geologic upheavals caused this but the whole area was this way. Perhaps they were the remnants of ancient glacial runoffs.
My mother was from Saint Louis, Missouri and claimed to never have seen rocks in Missouri . She was fascinated with all the rocks when she came west to meet and shortly marry my father. (Theirs was a romance by mail.) My father was no dummy so he took her to the City of Rocks State Park on their honeymoon and from there to his homestead and log cabins in a rocky canyon of the mountains. That was quite a change for a city girl. Apparently she got over her fascination with rocks because years later, on the farm when I was a little boy, she often tasked me with the chore of raking rocks out of the front yard. She insisted I do a good job and couldn’t understand where all the new rocks came from after hard summer rains.
I inherited her fascination with rocks and collected the pretty ones from the hills around the farm. I kept them on a sill of our screened-in porch. One time she gathered all of them up and threw them away and forbid me to collect any more. That didn’t altogether deter me for searching them out. I sometimes found opaque, glassy rocks and when I broke them open, found they were hollow inside and beautifully crystalline. I was just a little guy and I was convinced that I’d found diamonds. Boy did I ever keep that quiet! I planned to come back as an adult and mine those valuable diamonds and I did not plan to share the profits with my mother. Years later, I learned that those opaque, glassy rocks were actually called geodes and are often sold at rock hound conventions but they aren’t nearly as valuable as diamonds.
My mother was from Saint Louis, Missouri and claimed to never have seen rocks in Missouri . She was fascinated with all the rocks when she came west to meet and shortly marry my father. (Theirs was a romance by mail.) My father was no dummy so he took her to the City of Rocks State Park on their honeymoon and from there to his homestead and log cabins in a rocky canyon of the mountains. That was quite a change for a city girl. Apparently she got over her fascination with rocks because years later, on the farm when I was a little boy, she often tasked me with the chore of raking rocks out of the front yard. She insisted I do a good job and couldn’t understand where all the new rocks came from after hard summer rains.
I inherited her fascination with rocks and collected the pretty ones from the hills around the farm. I kept them on a sill of our screened-in porch. One time she gathered all of them up and threw them away and forbid me to collect any more. That didn’t altogether deter me for searching them out. I sometimes found opaque, glassy rocks and when I broke them open, found they were hollow inside and beautifully crystalline. I was just a little guy and I was convinced that I’d found diamonds. Boy did I ever keep that quiet! I planned to come back as an adult and mine those valuable diamonds and I did not plan to share the profits with my mother. Years later, I learned that those opaque, glassy rocks were actually called geodes and are often sold at rock hound conventions but they aren’t nearly as valuable as diamonds.
