is that a rock in your pocket?

First, get your mind outta the gutter. This might be what the security guard asks me when I pass through security on our flight to Santiago or Lima or San Francisco. 

Let's just get this out of the way: I ♥ rocks. And pine cones. And shells. And worn beach glass. Messages in bottles. Driftwood.

{this guy loves stones too : by jos van wunnik}

I'm the girl who lugs stones down from the mountain with her. (I can be kinda clumsy--even without a big pack or big belly--so casing the landscape for pretty rocks underfoot while I hike works out well.) When backpacking I try to stick with the smallish stones. I collect and whittle down the collection on the way. When we arrive home, I always find a surprise rock somewhere in my rucksack--along with the yellow rosary given to me by a dear friend, which has been traveling the globe so rigorously for the past three years.

S entertains my addiction to flotsam. One of the best presents ever: a huge piece of driftwood he brought back for me from a kayaking trip. How he balanced that fat birdlike beauty across his kayak on the windy waters is another work of art in itself. Obviously we won't have space or weight (it's about 15 kilos!) left to bring the wood with us; neither the bags of rocks I pulled from the cupboard last night.

It seems I have stones coming out of my ears. Last night I chose a double, mounded handful of my favorites, placing the heavy ones on a windowsill and the tiny not-gonna-part-with-these in a bag with the shells. Shells are light, right? Someday I hope to have a rock garden (along with our herbs, flowers and fruit trees), with swirls of shells in between. A shell mobile for the boy.

{black stone spiral by jos van wunnik}

Living our transient life and moving a few times a year doesn't lend itself to gardening, not even hard gardening. I'm not a hoarder by any stretch, and I know you can't take it with you. But maybe just one more stone. The one with the plant fossil, or the stripey striated ones like tree rings showing centuries of compression, or the ancient stamp of shell from the mountain's peak--reminding us that we were all under water once. That we know how to swim.

Do you collect anything? Do you frequently weed out your collected?