Sticks and Stones

The other night I was fumbling sleepily through my bedside drawer and I pulled a rock from the corner where my stash of ear plugs belong. I dropped it on my night stand, put in my ear plugs and fell back to sleep. In the morning, I spotted the rock next to the alarm clock and smiled at the fact that its presence in my drawer didn’t surprise me in the least. This house is full of rocks. Sam makes gifts of rocks. Sticks, too. And leaves.

By last summer’s end, there was a bowl of “interesting” and “beautiful” rocks on the kitchen window sill, emptied from all of our pockets after an outing. His child care cubby was littered with bits of playground gravel that caught his eye and thus became art. How does one get rid of such tokens so lovingly collected and bestowed by one’s child? I spread the bowlful in the vegetable garden last fall, thinking that, if asked about them later, I could say the rocks would do some good out there. Aeration, or what have you.

There are mulchy fragments of a leaf in the folds of my wallet, too. When I spy it among the receipts I stuff in there, I’m hit by a fond memory of Sam swimming across the pool at the Fort Wilderness Outpost to give it to me. “Here, Mom,” he whispered in all seriousness, “This is a present for you.” I dried out that little leaf on my deck chair before stashing it away, wondering how it is that the dead vegetation floating in the pool strikes Sam as a keepsake rather than a sign that the skimmer isn’t keeping up. Another leaf, a giant one he picked up while visiting Grandma and Grandpa Ashe last fall, was carefully pressed for the return flight and pinned to his bulletin board in the kitchen.


As funny as it is sometimes to find them piling up, I adore these natural treasures. Last summer he unearthed a smooth hunk of sparkly pink and grey Muskoka rock from the beach at Camp Hideaway and another specimen came home from Bonnechere. They’re lovely. Those rocks and the powerful “ninja stick” he found in the woods along Moccasin Trail are bunched together next to a framed portrait of Sam in the living room. The juxtaposition is fitting. Sam and his sticks and stones. Oh, and that's a clay coil pot he and I made at Bonnechere. Seemed the right place for it.

These things are not entirely out of place around here either, when I come to think of it. A jar of small white seashells sits on the bathroom shelf, a product of my beachcombing during our Madeira vacation three years ago. The pair of larger shells, the ones Grandpa found for the boys, are nestled at the edge of the backyard flower garden. A few feet away, there are two large river rocks lifted from Laddie Lane during our last visit there, a souvenir of our fun times around the pool with Grandma and Grandpa Arnold.

It’s possible that Sam took note of such gatherings while he was a preschooler, and that he’s imbued all of the little bits of the natural world he finds at this feet with meaning. It’s sweet and so much a part of his little boy character that one day I’m sure I’ll miss the rocks in my nightstand drawer, the crumpled leaves in my wallet.