Kelee: Vermont River Rock Jewelry

I grew up in the Mississippi Delta where the water is muddy. Not the drinking water. It's nice and clear (except in Greenville where it's sort of brownish). Just the rivers and ponds. It's because the bottom is dirt instead of rocks since the land was made from the Mississippi and Yazoo Rivers depositing dirt as they overflowed their boundaries instead of being formed by rocks and boulders being deposited by glaciers when they moved down from even norther like they are here in Vermont, where I now live. When you mix water and dirt, you get mud. When you mix water and rocks, you get water and rocks. We used to travel way up north to the mountains of Tennessee to see water flowing clear. It's really lovely.
I didn't take this picture, by the way. Here's a link to where I found it, however.

Before you start getting too high and mighty about your clear-flowing water in your town, please remember that it was by the sides of these muddy rivers that The Blues was born which gave birth to both Rock and Roll and was perverted into Pop. And the wonderful feeling of squishing your toes deep down into the muddy bottom of a lake and feeling catfish nibbling at your little pipe cleaner-sized legs is to die for. Literally, you could die when your leg is punctured by the spine of a catfish fin which then deposits a venom that causes scalding pain to spread upward from the wound and muscle spasms so severe that you fall into that muddy water where a water moccasin finishes you off. But right up to the point of the scalding pain, the mud between your toes really does feel good.

Out of the blue the other day my sister called me and said, "Remember how we used to go play in that swampy area across from our house in Silver City? Remember how Daddy would give us a stick in case we came across a water moccasin? Would you let your kids do that?"

To which I replied, "No, but I would let them play the Wii version of that."

When we moved to Vermont, Alison (my blogmate) was constantly trying to take us to Belvidere. I don't know why we were reluctant. Maybe because of the wacky-premised sitcom from the 80s with the same name. Maybe because we were tired of spending our one-day weekend driving around with a carsick child trying to follow directions like this:

“Go down to where the original barn was for the Boudreau farm. It's not there any more, but you turn right there where it used to be, and you go east on that road until you pass where the road flooded that time and you turn left. The road splits there. Go either way, but turn right if you go left and left if you go right. And do you know where the old 108 meets the new 105? Turn left right before you get to it.”

When we finally went out there, we couldn't stop asking, “Why have you never brought us here before?” It's really quite lovely. Alison's daughter's father's mother's husband's uncle's nephew owns a little patch of land there that is all grassy and bouldery and foresty and ferny and has a gorgey clear-flowing river running right through it. We camp out there and build bond fires and swim and hike about and nap and read and sit around in a lot of circles but without singing. Despite being a musician, Ben is not one of those kumbaya drum circle kind of dudes, and for that I will be eternally thankful. Amen. For some reason, it's always about ten degrees cooler out there, too. During that one week of really hot summer when the concrete jungle of the Village of Enosburg Falls has lost it's charm, we head out there. Of course, going from the sweltering 90 degrees of the Village to the 80 degrees of Belvidere makes it too cold for me to even think about getting in the water.

Oh, right. My point.

There are all these really gorgeous rocks that are just sitting out beside the river. Just sitting there. Like ordinary rocks. Only they are obviously jewelry-quality rocks. Let's say you are really into Topaz or Emeralds and you came across a stream and they were just sitting there waiting to be collected and turned into jewelry. Or you really like daisies, and you go somewhere where they are just considered a weed. You get to collect them for freesies and make a lovely bunch of flowers. Or you really like guitar pedals, and you found this tree where guitar pedals grew like leaves. This is how we felt. Alison and I and our offspring have spent many an hour gathering rocks from there (and various other swimming holes). We separate out the “keep rocks” from the “throw rocks.” I still remember a few really lovely specimen from the Keep Pile that were accidentally thrown into the water. I also remember hearing myself tell my children to not get my rocks dirty. It'll just give them a little something to talk about during therapy.

We worked for an embarrassingly long time trying to learn how to turn them into jewelry – drilling holes through everything but the rocks (including Alison's dining room table), finding out that we had no plan for attaching them to a necklace, using up our rock-jewelry-budget buying the wrong thickness of sterling silver wire. We are quite happy with these results and plan on expanding on this line of jewelry as soon as possible. In fact we just spent up our new rock-jewelry-budget ordering Raku-fired beads to combine with the rocks, and earrings are definitely in the works.

If you are interested, you can go buy one of these gorgey rock pendants at my etsy shop.