When I was a little boy, I had a secret diamond mine…….

[Timetrvlr]

When I was a little boy, I lived on a farm, and it was a great place for a little boy. One of my great treasures was my secret diamond mine. Sometimes I found oval, opaque rocks and discovered that when I broke them open, they were hollow inside and crystallized so that they sparkled and glittered in the sun and shone in several colors. I was sure they were diamonds. I planned to come back when I was grown and open a diamond mine. I never told anyone about this because I was pretty sure my folks wouldn’t believe they were real diamonds because poor people didn’t own diamond mines. I figured that if I told anyone else, they might steal my mine. Years later, I learned that what I had actually found were geodes which are fairly rare but were not uncommon on the hills above our farm.

 

[hollydolly]

Fairly rare?.... does that mean they were worth something?

 

[RadishRose]

How lovely Timetrvlr. I have seen a few geodes, they are beautiful. I've seen huge ones in museums.

https://geology.com/articles/geodes/

[h=3]Break-Open-A-Geode Kits[/h] Small, thin-walled geodes are often sold in kits by department, education, science, tourist and novelty stores. The vendor product descriptions encourage teachers, parents and students to purchase the kits and break the geodes open with a hammer. These geode kits are extremely popular. If you do a Google search for "geode kit" you will find them offered online by dozens of different vendors.

My grandsons had a small one.

 

[Falcon]

A friend had one and it was BEAUTIFUL ! It sparkled. Every household should have one on display. IMO

 

[Ruth n Jersey]

What a great discovery for a little boy. I bet you spent many happy hours cracking open those rocks. When I was a kid I found a small stone and it had a fossil of a wing from some type of insect. I had it for a long time. Not sure what happened to it.

 

[Timetrvlr]

What a great discovery for a little boy. I bet you spent many happy hours cracking open those rocks. When I was a kid I found a small stone and it had a fossil of a wing from some type of insect. I had it for a long time. Not sure what happened to it.

Funny how your story of misplacing a fossil wing opened up the floodgates of my memories. Our little farm was in southwestern New Mexico on the Gila River and was apparently a good place for subsistence farming through the millennia. We weren't the first to farm there, the Anasazi Indians lived and farmed there too a thousand years before. They left behind artefacts and remnants of building walls on our farm as well as on many others. My mother was interested in these artefacts and collected a number of small items; an exquisite bone needle, a sharpening stone that precisely fit the needle, and a tiny beautiful tiny arrowhead probable for hunting birds. I took those to school for show-and-tell on several occasions but I have no idea what eventually happened to them. Those were just a curiosity at the time but would be valuable museum pieces now.