Do this at home!

We collect rocks, in the summer, when we go to the lake in Montana, and then our enablers are sweet enough to ship them to us. So I have a nice collection of beautiful, smooth rocks that bring back the great memories of sitting on the beach and picking them out with the kids. Plus there's that wierd Heraclitus [of "you never step into the same river twice" fame] experience of throwing rocks into the water and recognizing that you've totally altered the universe (the details, if not the structure) and it's never going to be the same afterwards and then plunk! you can throw another rock and do it again. It's this beautiful balance of change and sameness.



Ahem. Anyway. We like rocks. We give them as gifts, sometimes, and right now we have a nice little collection of them surrounding a candle in front of this amazing Ansel Adams print I bought for like $10 at this cool garden store in Kentucky and it had a banged-up frame but I repainted it with a color intended to invoke the wrought-iron benches in Paris, and the whole effect is a little like a modern altar to nature.





And, um, anyway, when I saw the kids with their heads together doing something intense and intricate with the rocks on the couch, I thought they were making cairns, but as I got closer I could tell that something else was going on; there was some intense discussion about whether the "little ones" would want a "soft spot" or a "hard spot" and finally I realized that some of the rocks were babies and some of them were stacked together to make a house for said babies. They finally decided that the babies needed a soft spot, and lots of little rock babies were very happy for quite some time.