Rock Collection

When she was a child

with a strawberry blonde bowl hair cut

and tomboy clothes,

she kept a rock collection

in an orange Nike shoebox

that she stashed in her bedroom closet.

They were sparkling rose- and cream-colored jewels

or fossils of undiscovered dinosaurs

and igneous rocks, dug up from her grade school playground,

which she classified as evidence

that there had once been an ancient volcano in Griffith, Indiana.

One day, but she doesn’t remember when,

she realized that these rare and exquisite finds

were actually just landscaping stones from under the deck porch

and uninteresting chunks of coal.

Their value depreciated,

she released them back into the wild.