Today we went “treasure hunting” at my parents’ house. They are decluttering and I am trying to help, although it appears that helping also involves me taking home a lot of stuff. I’m an alternate lover of used goodies and impetuous pitcher of said goodies.
For an entire hour, we catalogued and put away my little brother’s rock collection. He hasn’t lived there for seven years, and the rocks were beautiful but very dusty. He was determined to become a geologist and had a rock and fossil collection that was amazing in its breadth. As a child and a young teen, he went on rock hounding trips with my father and grandfather and brought back vast numbers of rocks from different places in our region.
On the way home, my daughter wore her little purse and stopped along the walk to pick up rocks, examine them, and put them into the purse. Now, we’re talking granite landscaping rocks, the kind that have shiny bits of mica in them and look alluring to four-year-olds. When we stepped off the bus at our townhouse complex, she freed the rocks on the slope near our house.
This got me wondering: my daughter moves sticks, rocks, and other natural treasures around frequently. We bring cones home from walks and who knows, perhaps they grow into trees. It got me wondering about preschoolers as a natural force. Some plants like burrs rely on animal fur to move them around. Other plants rely on wind, air, and water to help them pollinate. Some rocks are moved forcefully out of a volcano, and others rise slowly as part of mountains.
How about the preschooler? I think that in my next natural history exercise, I shall catalogue the movements of the preschooler and their impact on the rooting of new trees and bulbs and the geological movements of gravel around our city. They may be a new and undiscovered force of nature, these preschoolers.
When you hear about me getting the Nobel Prize for Geology in a few years, you can say that you heard it here first.