A few years before my parents bought the property in northern Michigan, we went camping with the people who lived behind us. My Uncle Tiffin and his family joined us. The story stone in the pewter ice bucket that reminds us of this trip is a simple, flat stone. There's a very thin line of chain coral on it. Chain coral is a type of fossil. It looks like a segmented tapeworm is wrapping itself around the stone. If you break open a chain coral, the fossil is not inside it. They formed about 450 million years ago.
The story goes that we were finding a lot chain coral along the shores of Wilderness State Park. All the families were partaking in the hunt for semi-precious stones. My mom had her eye out for something called the Isle Royal Gemstone, a green gem she felt we were sure to find since were at the tip of the lower peninsula and the upper peninsula was only five miles away across the Straits of Mackinaw.
My Aunt Pat was growing bored of picking up green rocks and asking my mom if that was what she wanted. After a while Aunt Pat stopped and began tossing rocks she knew weren't what my mother wanted back into the lake. At one point she tossed a stone over her shoulder announcing it was 'just another damn piece of chain coral.'
The stone hit her daughter in the forehead. My cousin survived but had a knot on her forehead the rest of the weekend.
STUMPSTONE QUOTE OF THE DAY:
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