Sprinkled with Stones

     When I was growing up, my sister and I would sit in the decorative rocks that surrounded our house, sifting through the stones, searching for interesting ones. Pink ones, blue ones, multicolored ones; ones that showed fossils of what was surely a prehistoric lizard, ones that showed a million years of sediment gathering in a single space. Our dad worked with rock quarries, too, so sometimes he brought rocks home for us -- some were smooth and chipped off in thin sheets; others were crusty with layers of other rock or even concrete. Some he'd break open with a hammer, and we'd look over his hands, hoping he would reveal colorful crystals. By the time I was ten or so, we had two ice cream buckets full of stones sitting in the shed where we kept our bikes. We wanted to keep them separate, in their place of honor, revered as the beauties we believed them to be.

    As an adult, I started picking up interesting stones whenever I was out and about on adventures of different kinds. I kept them on my knick-knack shelf next to my framed family photos, my tiny china teacup, my penguin statue. The stone on the footpath in France that looked like an eye gazing back up at me as I finally felt God walking with me. The flat worry stone from Spain, found on a day when worries were hard to find. The handful of tiny stones from the beach on Lake Michigan, from that afternoon when we knew our friendships were changing but still held hope that they would last. 

     I wanted to keep something from those days that I could hold -- something tangible from those places that held so many fleeting memories, so many lessons, so much emotion. I wanted to be able to point to one and say, "That's the evidence. That day was real. I was there. I won't forget."

     Now I've been collecting these stones for over a decade, and they sprinkle my home in a dozen different places. Some still grace my shelves for all to see.

     But I find others in the most unexpected places. Next to my jewelry box, all mixed up with my hairpins and makeup brushes. In the bottom of a tote bag. On top my bookshelf in the corner of the living room. These stones still tell stories of lessons learned and adventures had and the spectrum of tears wept to laughter shared. But I can't remember which of them came from which place anymore.

     The path on the day I spent quietly watching the deer work her way around the pond.

     The top of the Great Wall of China.

     The banks of the lake after we'd all just floated there together, laughing, when hours felt like days. 

     Did I bring one home last summer?

     As I held the rough, pink one in my hand and thought of the smooth, brown rippled one in the next room, I knew it doesn't matter where they're from anymore. Doesn't really matter which one is which. They're now as much a part of my home's landscape as they were once a part of the places where I gathered them; this is now where they belong. They still strike a chord within me each time they catch my eye, and the memories -- whichever they happen to conjure -- are so woven into who I am that I no longer need to hold the stones just to relive the moments.