So many rocks – so little time.
Here in New Mexico, that has become my motto.
If you’re not a rock lover, you won’t understand this post. But if you are a rock lover …

I can’t remember when my love of rocks began. I’m sure I was pretty young, because I still have the first rock shop bracelet my dad ever bought for me. No way it fits around my wrist now, but I can’t bear to part with it. The rocks still shine, even though a couple of them have disappeared. They are multi-colored, and I can still tell you the name of each one. My favorites? Tigers eye and Snowflake Obsidian.

So, I’m in heaven right now, surrounded by rocky hills and road cuts, where all colors of rocks glitter in the sun. Many of them include bits of mica, that thin sheet of flaky mineral which catches the light and makes you think you’ve stumbled upon a diamond mine. Rock colors range from yellow to green to red to gray, and every color in between.

I can’t resist the pink ones, and the opaque white ones draw my eye every time. Yesterday, I found a white one that had once been part of a geode, a small crescent of smoky quartz crystals glitter in a scooped out portion of the broken edge.

Once of the best places I’ve found rocks? The driveway of our little house. Everyone out here has a driveway of river rock, or anyway, rock that some big machine scooped up and carried to the neighborhood when the houses were built and the driveways were laid twenty plus years ago.

My best driveway finds? A beautiful agate which a native American had chiseled into a scraper, TWO Apache tears (obsidian) and a small green cube that turned out, when inspected, to be petrified wood.

Now, I volunteer to walk the long drive to get the mail, and as tempting as it is to watch the beautiful New Mexico sky, I can’t lift my eyes from the rocky driveway.

As I said at the beginning, so many rocks, so little time.