by Kimberly A. Cook (Twitter@ WarriorTales)
Distracted easily, that’s me. Finally had a day of sun last Friday and I could hardly make up my mind what to do first. I avoided all the things I “should” do and bolted into the backyard to assess fairy house door construction.
The Douglas Fir stump in the middle of the Fairy Rock Garden is going to become a house. With this in mind I have already cut up one of the leftover cedar fence boards for a roof.
Assembly challenges exist on that since I can’t figure out how to nail the pieces together, even with a vice. Think glue first, then nails.
Have been able to de-cone several pine cones to get the shakes ready for the roof, but I digress. Last year I bought a variety of fairy house doors and now was the first opportunity to go outside without a scuba suit on for more than ten minutes and play.
Gathered the fairy house door booty and headed out. Tried several different doors and the size problem appeared. Too small or too big. The Goldilocks issue. When I finally figured out the little door with the Welcome sign on it would work the best, I noticed a shiny pretty rock in the special lake rocks.
This is how it starts. For us born rock hounds, it was a simple pick up of one rock. That is never enough. Before I knew it I was matching rocks for earring sets. Like when am I going to get my butt in gear to do that?
Never stopped me before, so on I gathered. Ended up using one of the large fairy house doors as a tray. When I had trouble finding exact matches I hauled out the kitty litter plastic bucket still half-full of leftover rocks. There is another full container since I obviously didn’t know how many rocks I would need. Backup rocks.
While I sat in the sun hunched over the plastic bucket, happiness ensued. One challenge was the lake rocks had been out all winter and were completely rinsed off, not so the ones in the bucket. Dust on these, so this required some spitting to get the true color on some rock specimens.
When I finally stopped since the tray was full, it worked well until I tripped on getting up and launched three of the rocks into oblivion, never to be recovered. Sigh. When baby rocks fall into other rocks and on a cement walkway studded with rocks, forgetaboutit. I did a scan, nada.
Pretty proud of myself I only lost three of the rocks, though. Can use the others as pendants. You betcha.
If you’ve got a rock hound in your family, we’ve got Mother’s and Father’s Day coming up. Go to a local landscape rock place, find the “specialty” rocks and buy a couple pounds. Perfect!
Got rock stories?
When I went with a friend out to Long Island to visit her parents, she asked her dad to take me out to the very end of the island to look around. He kept apologizing as he drove me there, and I kept thanking him. We got to the parking lot of the ferry that goes to Connecticut and there were all these wonderful New York rocks that came from the far Canadian north during the Ice Age. Nothing like our volcanic Oregon rocks. I ran around like a lunatic picking all of them up, then realizing I had to fly back to Oregon, I had to judge which ones I just had to have. On the way back to the house, I kept apologizing for being a crazy geologist but the rocks all had such stories!