Each rock has a story.  (If you’re not into rocks, don’t worry.  I’ll only indulge my passion from time to time.)  In this case, I was looking for an artifact that I’ve had since I was a child.  Back in the day when visitors to the Petrified Forest National Park took souvenirs without too many stabs of conscience, a former minister of my childhood church gave my mother two pieces.  Of course, she had three sons at the time and the two elder ended up with the heirlooms.  I’m not certain they were from the National Park, I would add.  I was only about five at the time.  When I got to college I found this ironic because, as I outgrew my fundamentalism I realized the fossil trees are about 225 million years old and the Bible the minister so fervently believed implied that God created everything merely 6,000 years ago.  In any case, this piece of petrified wood became one of my treasures.

At Nashotah House my geology gene awoke.  I recall having had this fossil on display.  Then tragedy.  That job, and my full-time teaching career, ended.  Most of my books and all of my rocks (the collection had grown considerably) were packed in boxes and were in storage.  They moved to New Jersey with us, still boxed up.  They came to Pennsylvania with us as well, still in boxes.  Talking to my older brother one day, the pieces of petrified wood came up.  I realized that I had no idea where mine was.  It’d been packed twenty years before and although I’d opened most of the boxes from our move, that particular tree cum rock now seemed to have gone the way of the dinosaurs.

While doing weekend chores, one of which involved straightening out things in the garage, I found an unopened box.  Inside the box was a set of smaller boxes.  Most of them had seashells we picked up while living in New Jersey, but the very bottom box, unopened for decades, held my long lost piece of petrified wood.  I picked it up, feeling a piece of my childhood again.  An innocence lost repeatedly and lost especially loudly at Nashotah House.  It was like reaching back to the Triassic Period from whence this tree had originally come.  Dinosaurs roamed Arizona at the time.  This tree was older than the Good Book claimed any artifact had a right to be.  I don’t know that the minister took this from the Petrified Forest itself, or some other location that has fossilized trees.  Of what I’m certain is that this rock has a story.