By Barbara J. Eikmeier

For many years I collected sea glass. I filled a small jar with pieces from beaches in Hawaii and California. It took a long time to fill my jar. Imagine my surprise when my sister took me to Glass Beach in Fort Bragg, California. I felt like there was more glass than sand on that beach. It made my humble collection look, well, humble.

In my yard in Eastern Kansas sit two pink boulders and several lesser boulders. They were excavated when the house was built in 1992. They are probably rose quartz although I hear people call them pink granite (mine don’t look like granite.) They are unique to my area of Kansas, and I see them in neighbors’ yards too. I’m not a native Kansan but have been told these pink rocks were a gift from Minnesota, brought down during the ice age. When the ice receded, the big rocks were left behind.

Visitors from out of the area have been known to covet my pink rocks, in fact at least two visitors collected smaller samples from my property to take home with them.

When the utility company trenched across our yard to replace a gas line, they unearthed more pink rocks. The evening before the trench was to be filled in, I claimed those pink rocks. With my husband’s help we rolled the biggest and pinkest of them down the hill, laughing all the way, to the spot where the driveway leveled out. Then we got our piano mover, which is not really a piano mover, but it works like one, (I bought it at an estate sale for fifty cents!) We rolled those big rocks onto that platform and wheeled them to select locations in the gardens. The new rocks are a fraction the size of my big pink boulders, but they still weighed a ton!

I’ve been basking in the glory of owning such rare and special rocks for years.

I’m writing this post while on a road trip with my husband. We spent two days in South Dakota where pink rocks are everywhere.  Apparently, my pink rocks may have been a gift from South Dakota instead of Minnesota.

Near Sioux Falls, South Dakota there is a huge quarry with a giant heap of pink rocks.

Further west I noticed them used for landscaping at rest stops along Interstate 90. Heck, in some sections, Interstate 90 itself glows pink because it’s made of crushed pink stone mixed with the asphalt. When we stopped, I checked. I could see the bits of pink rock.

The driveway in the campground we stayed at was made of crushed pink rock. I picked up two heart shaped stones for my granddaughter. I stopped at two, but I could have found 100, all pink, all heart shaped!

And the greatest shock of all, to me anyway, was pink rocks on the edges of the train tracks.

It feels like Glass Beach all over again!

Have you ever discovered that your rare collection isn’t so rare after all?

Barbara J. Eikmeier is a quilter, writer, student of quilt history, and lover of small-town America. Raised on a dairy farm in California, she enjoys placing her characters in rural communities.