If you're a hillbilly, or descended from a hillbilly, it ain't natural if you don't have a collection. You can collect just about anything, but lots of folks collect ROCKS. I personally stick with books and music--I tend not to understand why a person would collect rocks. Arrowheads, okay, and I know they're made out of rock...but just rocks? I've never understood how a person could have a house totally free of clutter, either--that's about as foreign to me as a house that gets dusted more than--well, I plead the Fifth. My bathrooms are clean, though. We went to CO on vacation the summer I was 12. We drove a 1967 Ford Galaxy--it was pretty--and it was pretty loaded with suitcases and us. A week later, it was loaded even heavier with rocks...rocks that Daddy picked up. I don't know if those rocks are any different from Taney County rocks, but I do wonder if some future archeologist/rock-dude geologist will be able to tell a difference, and think there was an Ice Age or something during the 20th Century? I must be a mutant in the family, for my son, my dad, and my Grandma all collect rocks. And I've met all kinds of people, native to Taney and other WRV counties, who collect rocks. And believe it or not, they ain't even close kin, just married in somewhere! And once in a while, there isn't even a marriage in common... There's a guy who lived over by Forsyth who had done all kinds of landscaping with thousands of arrowheads he'd found over the years. As I said, arrowheads, I kinda understand... Daddy can just walk around a place for a couple of minutes, and if there's an arrowhead within 100 feet of him, it'll jump up and lay there, right out in the open, begging for him to pick it up and take it home with him. Over the years, he's gotten so many, he'll look it over good, and if it's a decent one, he'll put it in his pocket. He might toss it in a pile of just-decent ones when he gets home, but again...what are the archeologists going to think? Daddy doesn't carve them, although he knows folks who do, and he's messed around with some flake-chipping. Should I leave a letter in a time capsule to those poor future archeologists? I've mentioned before--this man will go out every so often, dig a hole somewhere on the property, and put a currently-dated item at the bottom, put back some dirt, then drop one of his just-decent arrowheads in between that and the top...and fill it back in till he's done. But it just occurred to me that the rock collecting is another problem. When Greg and I thought we were going to get our house built up north of Bear Creek, my son TJ would jump in front of the backhoe Greg was moving dirt with, to "rescue" a rock. We currently don't know exactly where these rocks are--I'm afraid to ask. I do know they aren't in his bedroom. Greg wondered why TJ was collecting rocks, but then I found a big limestone flake that had broken off the shelf during the hole-digging, and decided it would look good up on the road (200 feet up a very steep hill), with our house number carved on it. It's sitting up there, now, too. Greg only asked "why?" once, and I told him not to claim to be hillbilly if he asked again. Them city folks up in Springfield last spring decided to put a park in the center city area. They're going to "find" Jordan Creek, which was the place the first settlers founded Springfield on, and had been covered with concrete and asphalt over the years since. I got sorta aggravated when the newspaper published that a big debate was going on--should we make Jordan Creek one of those futuristic-looking springs that has fountains and statues? I wanted to go up and knock on someone's forehead to ask if they were home. I wasn't the only one, for a huge turnout at the next planning meeting hollered for a "natural" brook, with "real" rock and moss, ending in a pool. This will re-create Jordan Creek some distance above where the real Jordan Creek presumably still flows. I know where they can get some real rocks, too. Grandma has what appears to be a pile of creek gravel around her front door. The first step going up to the door (which is about 30 inches above the ground), is a nice flat rock, semi-oval, about 24 inches across. The next two steps are concrete block-built, with a base about 4 feet wide. All around this "stoop", she has these rocks--the seemingly-innocent creek gravel, but I know better--she's picked up over the years. I've seen her doing it. She can tell you, of all these thousand rocks, which ones came from where, and why she picked it up...that one is a fossil of some creature, this one looks like MO without the boot heel, that one she got in Washington DC when she visited my aunt. The bigger ones, the ones she brought home from the Gulf of Mexico or Florida and sundry other places, they are all lined up along the house foundation. All the way around the house. This was apparently a Phenix family trait--I don't know where y'all who don't have an ancestor named Phenix got it. But my gg grandmother's brother, Levi Phenix, apparently liked rocks and caves so much, he spent most of his time messing with them. About 20 years ago, the county came through and did some digging for water lines from various county wells, in case residents wanted or needed to tap into them in the future. Dirt in the WRV being a scarce commodity everywhere but down in the valleys, they had to dig up some big rocks in order to bury the lines. Grandma has a rock about the size of a queen-sized bed (and 18 inches tall) up where Wilson Lane meets Bee Creek Road from those crews. She just walked up and told them one day that since they had to take out some trees she'd planted in the 1950s, they could just leave that rock there. And they did. Another one, this one about 3 1/2 feet tall and the width of a breakfast table, sits nearby. That's rock collecting. Scary, ain't it? My family has rocks from places all over the US. You know the really sad part? Greg and I were in WalMart tonight, trying to figure out some kind of wedding gift for his sister. On an endcap, there sat these table-top fountains. They are some kind of cast resin or something, with real rocks to scatter around the "pool" base. The rocks have been so highly polished, you can see your reflection in them. Greg, who can fix or build anything except for a hearing aid (and they're pretty specialized!) kept walking, but I started messing with those rocks on the display model. I mentioned to him when he came back that he could build me one of these fountains (hint, hint), and we could put our own rocks in it. We bought one for his sister. We bought Rocks. That's bad. Vonda