To begin this blog post, I’ll borrow a line from a favorite John Denver song: “some days are diamonds, some days are stones” …
You can liken diamonds versus stones to life in general, or the weather.
In this case, I’m referring to the weather. Yesterday was just superb, and it got to 70 degrees by day’s end. My morning walk was perfect, and I racked up five miles with a warm breeze blowing and a blue sky overhead.
Today was not so great weather-wise. I went out to run the car and decided those few rain sprinkles that landed on my nose did not really warrant going back into the house, so, with my umbrella in hand I set out. I didn’t even get to the cross street before the raindrops started falling in earnest, so I headed home.
Yesterday’s trip to Council Point Park yielded more than merely gleaning steps and enjoying the ambiance. It was the first sighting of a painted rock for 2018. Last year, a new craze was born in many states, but especially here in Southeast Michigan. People started painting all shapes and sizes of rocks and hiding them around town, sometimes in parks, or often in eateries, malls, office buildings – you name the venue and you could find a painted rock. If you found such a “treasure”, you could either keep your “find” or re-hide it. I first wrote at length about being a rock hound in this post: https://lindaschaubblog.net/2017/05/07/rocky-road/
Those rock-hiding-and-finding-expeditions were the subject of several newspaper articles and a few posts by me over the course of the Summer of 2017. The fad lasted right through the Fall, with snow and cold putting the kibosh on any rock hiding/finding expeditions in park venues until Spring. With the late start to our Spring, there were no rocks hidden along the perimeter path at Council Point Park … that is, until yesterday (as to me anyway).
I saw a pink, polka-dotted rock festooned with orange flowers, but I left it there for someone else to discover and re-hide. I knew there would be plenty of kids arriving after school on such a warm, beautiful day and would love to find a rock that looked like it belonged in an era of hippies, flower power and “mod” art.
Though I followed the Downriver Rocks Facebook group site all last Summer, I’d not been there in ages, until I peeked just now to see if someone claimed that pretty rock I left behind. Amazingly, not one of the now 37,255 group members had posted a photo of their “find” so perhaps that beauty is still at large, or in someone’s home being used as a paperweight.
These creative folks buy their rocks in bulk at landscape supply stores and get their painting supplies from local craft stores. Some of the most-recent objets d’art that will be hidden or re-hidden once the pesky raindrops quit falling are pictured below, and you see they range from simple to sublime:
I’m thinking my blogging pal, elementary teacher AJ, might like to undertake this hobby with her class before school ends in June.
Since rocks are the topic for Tuesday Musings this week, I’ll share a gem I discovered this morning. This particular gem was a comment by Tom Peace, a fellow blogger who collects fossils and is knowledgeable about them. He has given me some insight into the rock I wrote about in Sunday’s blog post. All these years I thought the rock my boss brought me back from a trip to Canada was the cartilage of a baby dinosaur’s toe and Tom identified this unusual rock as “an orthoceras fossil, a cephalopod from the Ordovician or Silurian period… over 400 million years old, when Ontario and Illinois were all underwater (in a huge ocean). Orthoceras was a type of squid with a straight cone shell.”
You’ll recall I had wondered if this fossil was ancient sea creature. Now, that I know how old it is, perhaps I should scoop that impressive rock out of the rock garden and put it somewhere safe.
I’ll ponder on it … in the meantime, I’ll just keep rocking on, er … walking on.
lindasschaub
