I’m a big fan of rocks, which I haul home from the beach or country to use in various ways around my apartment, for Chicken Under a Brick Rock, or keep the air conditioner from rattling. They make beautiful, rather elemental doorstops. They’re also wonderul to look at with no use at all, piled up somewhere.
I know a guy who piled beautiful smallish round stones in shades of white and gray in the corner of his shower, to remind him the beach every morning…
I recently toured a university geology department and noted they had the most interesting door stops. One was a fossilized shell big as a cantaloupe that had been bitten by a mosasaur.
How completely swell and inspiring. I’d LOVE one of those.
I cannot help but bring rocks and shells back from places I love. When they’re done being pretty displays in bowls and on mantles, I wedge them between flagstone slabs in my Minnesota patio or nestle them next to perennials in the garden. Every spring they are waiting to remind me of that mountain in Panama, that beach in Ecuador. Wish I could be here when some future archeologist tries to figure out how it all got into this piece of northern landscape.