Rocks, Shared Happiness, and an Honorable Mention

Expressing My Gratitude the Long Way

Heather Monroe
7 min readOct 26, 2021

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Desert Photograph/Heather Monroe

I want to give thanks for my honorable mention in the Medium Writers Challenge. But first, I want to tell you a story about rocks, gratitude, and shared happiness.

Edie and Me

I have a beautiful friend named Edie, and together we were the rocker chicks of Northern Arizona. We met through work, slinging tools in a familiar retail store we liked to call The Big Orange Box of Hades.

Edie noticed me on a day that I ran my big mouth, and the boss exiled me to babysit the folks in self-checkout. I stood at a cash register, ignoring customers with a rock in one hand and a toothpick in the other. She looked a little confused and mostly intrigued.

“Whatcha got there, sunshine?” she asked.

I didn’t look up from my palm-sized, mud-encrusted rock.

“You see that right there?” I pointed at a translucent flash of rootbeer-colored stone peaking up through the baked-on mud and tooled a pinch of it away. “Do you know what that is?”

Edie quickly donned the reading glasses that hung from a cord on her neck and examined my little treasure. “Huh. That’s pretty, isn’t it?”

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Heather Monroe

Welcome readers! Heather Monroe is a genealogist and writer who resides in California with her partner and their nine children. •True Crime• History• Memoir•