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That’s what a trip to the Crater of Diamonds State Park in Pike County taught me.
My son, J.T., crouched over a stream cloudy with clay and sediment and panned through gravel and sand. “We found a diamond,” he’d scream, clutching at any white stone that happened to sift through the mire.
In the end, we had six of his “diamonds” — all of them worthless. One, which I guessed might have been quartz, was revealed to be a piece of common concrete by the stone-inspecting lady behind the counter.
The heat there during the summer is oppressive and unforgiving. There was no shelter to be had, just the vast expanse of the tilled-up diamond field and the sun and the heat. Although, a passing thunderstorm that just missed us offered some cloud cover and a breeze. I expected our preschooler to start complaining pretty quickly.
I expected to hear the usual things that come out of the mouths of children: I’m bored! I’m too hot! I’m tired! I want to go home!
Instead, J.T. was content to pan load after a load of dirt for hours in the hopes of finding a stone that meant more to him as a Minecraft reference than as a precious material formed miles beneath the Earth’s crust.
By the end, his golden curls clung to the front of his face in ringlets. He had mud splattered up his cheek and across his forehead.
He guzzled a few bottles of water and wondered how it was we came to be so lucky in our diamond pursuits.
I thought about my own childhood, and how it’s nice to know kids are still drawn to digging in the dirt. I used to have a sandbox in my yard when we lived in Virginia. It looked like a giant green turtle, its shell popping off to reveal the sand within.
The only treasure in that bad boy might have been a He-Man action figure I’d lost the week before. That didn’t stop me spending countless hours digging to the bottom, digging trenches, building castles.
I never found anything in that sandbox except the joy of the texture of the sand between my toes, something I carry with me to this day.
There’s a reason I vacation on the same strip of white sand along the Gulf of Mexico every summer.
But I think I might have to make a new stop every now and then: Murfreesboro.
I’m not trying to strike it rich. I just want to collect a few gemstone memories for myself and my family — little fingers and dirt and water and mud.
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A version of this post was previously published on CourierNews.com and is republished here with permission from the author.
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