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My mum spent much of our youth, upon return from yearly holidays to her small seaside home town, tumbling rocks. We were kinda cluttered people growing up, so a
by thom 1y ago
My mum spent much of our youth, upon return from yearly holidays to her small seaside home town, tumbling rocks. We were kinda cluttered people growing up, so among other things (an extensive sci-fi collection, hundreds of kitchen gadgets, every microcomputer under the sun) we always had little piles and containers of beautiful shiny rocks strewn around the place. I never had the patience for the tumbling process, but on every beach I considered it my responsibility to find the most intriguing shapes and colours of rocks, fill my pockets, and bring them home. She died this year. We were supposed to scatter her ashes on that beach but my dad refused for inscrutable reasons. And I have a big pile of boring, dull rocks, that neither my mum, nor the relentless sea, is ever going to transform.
- collingreen 1y agoSorry for your loss. I hope you find good closure when you're ready - your rock collection is a great treasure and might serve as either a memento for you or a surrogate for ashes if you wanted to spread them on your nearby beach. Kind of a nice metaphor for a life well lived; collected from the chaos of the beach, polished up, and eventually returned, hopefully leaving things a little bit better.
- technothrasher 1y agoYour mum sounds very much like someone I would have liked.
- mslt 1y agoSorry you lost your mum, I’m in that club too. The relentless sea may not transform them the way she did, but it will transform them nonetheless. Might be a worthwhile ritual taking a handful to the shore and launching them out into earth’s great rock tumbler in her honor. Or not; grief wears a new mask for each of us.