When I was in third grade, one of the first big assignments my class received was to create a pet rock. I suppose the idea came from our teacher likely having lived through the first pet rock phenomenon, but this assignment required deeper thinking than just sticking a rock in a box with some makeshift bedding. Our pet rocks were to truly be created. Given their own unique look, a personality, and, of course, a name.
As someone who has always enjoyed creating characters and giving backstory to things, I was excited about this assignment. I dug around in the yard until I found a rock that I thought would be the perfect shape to be made into a unique character. That night, I brought the rock inside and pored over every googly eye and bow and bead we had (my parents made and sold crafts at the time), while my parents stood impatiently with the hot glue gun, until I’d found the perfect combination, and a little being, who I immediately named “Mindy” came into existence.
(This picture is from 2018, when my mother randomly found her while cleaning the house. She’s still around, somewhere.)
I don’t remember a whole lot about the specifics of Mindy’s backstory, but the one defining characteristic I remember giving her was that, despite the fact that she had yet to experience Halloween, it was her favorite holiday “because when I told her about it, she got really excited”, and I believe there was also a promise to take her trick or treating included in the paper I handed in with her, though whether or not this came to fruition, I can’t recall. I know that I remained attached to Mindy for longer than any of my other classmates probably did to their pet rocks, and I don’t know how or why she wound up tossed aside and forgotten, not to reappear until just before my thirty-first birthday.
Thoughts of Mindy have come and gone since she resurfaced in 2018, but I was recently reminded of her once more when my friend Cecilia,
CecimayArt on Etsy, came up with a creation she referred to as “pebble witches”. I loved them immediately (and heard Greg from Over the Garden Wall in my head saying “It’s a rock fact!”) and couldn’t help but notice that one of them seemed to capture the updated essence of Mindy, as she would fit into my life today.
This adorable little pebble witch has become my new Mindy, and expresses things that I was afraid, or maybe didn’t even know how, to project in my youth.
I think it’s such a wonderful thing, to find something that was created by another person, that speaks to you so personally about something from your own past. That’s one of the things I love about collecting art. You never know what someone may come up with, from their own heart and mind, that stimulates yours.
Stay spooky, my friends, and remember:
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