Rock Shopping

For the last year, I've been thinking about what I wanted from the mammoo's house. I had strong feelings, and I had dustups with my siblings, they had dustups with each other, all about stuff. You think you'll never have hard feelings about anything, and then you do. Boo!

After living with all of my mom's stuff and moving much of it to our garage, thinking about it, working with auction houses, tossing lots of it out...the closer I got to owning some of this stuff the less I wanted it. Even the stuff I was really attached to.

And our garage is now the baleen of the guy family. There are items (some large) that I'm holding onto until people can pick them up. There is all the good china and crystal that will live here while we continue to host Christmas. There are linens that I brought over so we can sort and iron and divvy them up.

But this is what I really wanted and put aside: Pop's crowbar, the lucky horseshoe from over the garage door, granny's fancy hangers, and all my mom's rocks. Back in the day, when Pet Rocks were the rage, my mom wouldn't buy me one. It was, after all, a rock. We had rocks and I could choose one. So I did, and I named it Camilla after Camilla Hall, a member of the Symbionese Liberation Army. If you grew up where and when I did, you were likely to be obsessed with the SLA. Eventually I returned Camilla (the rock) to her native environment in the suburbs.

She was the first rock I took from our house. Now she's hanging out on the front porch:

And last week I liberated most of the rest of the mammoo's fine rocks. She, her caregiver and I took a road trip and looked at our empty house. The painters were still finishing up. Mom puttered around and I dug up rocks. I warned the ladies that they'd have some rocks at their feet on the ride home, because I needed to spread out the load.

Then I drove a different way home, because the road to our house is so steep that on a good day I have to pull my weenie car over to let others pass.

Here's the haul:

And here they are around the lemon tree. When I look down from the kitchen den I can see this little piece of home.