As tap dancing was out of the question for me, I did my best to regress, and tried to remember what I was doing in the 7^th grade. There was that wonderful family trip to a garnet quarry in Roxbury, Connecticut in the very early 1960s. The memory had the quality of a fantasy, like finding pirate's treasure, marveling at these perfectly formed garnets, astonished that the earth could make such things. Then there was the trip our Earth Science class took to find pyrite. I did some searching and actually located the piece I found 40 odd years ago.

I took this as a sign, dug up the crumpled brochure for the Rhode Island Mineral Hunters Club I had put aside years back, signed my husband and I up, and went to our first mineral show with some friends. We all stood in amazement before the most gorgeous mineral any of us had ever seen. It looked like blue falling water. Behind the table, this wonderful blonde lady – the friendliest person in the show – told us everything about it, and didn't seem to mind that we were taking her time to learn about a piece that was beyond our means. She was so forthcoming and clearly shared the beauty of it with us anyway. That person turned out to be Stephanie from Stonetrust.

We since reconnected with Stephanie and Robert at the mineral show in Franklin, New Jersey. Her displays made us see that the artful selection of several minerals in one display heightens the beauty of each, and together they are more exquisite than they were alone. We realized this was a whole other art form (!) which only increased our delight of collecting, and we started our own acquisitions then and there, with aspirations for more. I now fantasize about a trip to India to find a fluorapophyllite. In this fantasy, a mysterious person from Maharashtra meets us in a café with a bundle swathed in white cloth. He unwraps it to reveal the world's most breathtaking specimen, which of course I buy on the spot. And why not? You don't have to be 11 years old to dream!

Thank you, Stephanie.