finding cross rocks

We did a little exploring this weekend, right in our own neck of the woods. We camped a few nights in neighboring Little Falls and played tourist. We had donuts at a local bakery, wandered a pretty little park on the Mississippi, and searched for cross rocks, or, Staurolite at Blanchard Dam in Royalton, MN. 

I hadn't even heard of cross rocks before this weekend, but a search for "rock hounding, Little Falls MN" turned up one result...cross rocks. Naturally, we had to check it out. After a short drive and a short hike, we found ourselves at the river's edge at the bottom of the dam. We weren't really sure what we were looking for, or where we should be looking, but once we found our first piece we were off and running. Each of us found at least one cross, and gobs of straight pieces. We had a blast!

This was my best piece:

E had a good selection of her own. Her favorite being the one that looked like a little plane:

I found two heart stones, but this one was my favorite:

We also found this little friend and the kids loved on him for a minute before we set him back in the water.

We cooked our meals on the fire and I read aloud 'Ronia, the Robber's Daughter' to eager listeners who didn't even seem to mind that their tablets and phones were nowhere around. I felt connected in a way that I've been missing lately, with the busy-ness of work and life. Good stuff, all of it.

Have you been exploring lately?

let's pretend

Late summer at dusk.  The mosquitos have gone to bed and the fireflies hang in the trees like christmas lights.

Our ice cubes clink in our glasses as we sip on the last of the homemade kahlua and listen to the owls call to each other from the tall pines in the back woods.

We sit and chat about how the garden is coming along nicely, about how nice the day out on the lake had been.  We hear the guineas settle into the branches of the poplar.  The last sparks of the campfire lift lazily into the sky.

Our sandals dangle from our feet.  We start to think maybe we'll go throw a sweatshirt on over our t-shirts.  We catch the faintest whiff of impending autumn in the air.  And we feel content.

I'm not the kind of person that wants to live her life only looking forward to the next thing.  I'd like to embrace the present.  But I gotta tell ya, this snow-up-to-my-thigh and "today's high will be -10" is gettin' old.  So if pretending that I'm holding a chilled kahlua instead of a hot coffee is going to get me though this day, that's what I'm going with.

I hope you're in a good place today, no matter where that is.  Come join me for a kahlua.