My husband's great-grandpa, the one who built the house we live in, was a rock collector. There is an enormous pile of rocks behind our garage. Some of them are flat, and I've been using them to make paths around our yard (some of the paths were already in place, just sunken and buried due to years of neglect). Some of them, some of the coolest ones, are far to big for me to move, but I've been rolling some of them out and across the yard to display them.
There used to be a rock garden, but it was torn out and piled with all the other rocks. I wish like anything that hadn't been done. Rocks are a lot easier to care for than a lawn.
We don't have money to spend on our yard. Some people- our neighbors all around us, particularly- can afford to have people come in and dig, plant, weed, water, whatever. They buy flowers that are already blooming, trees, gravel and stones for patios...
And I wish we could do those things, sometimes, because that would be a quick, fairly easy way to fix the yard up.
Instead, I wait til my kids are sleeping, throw an ugly ball cap on, grab a pair of gloves, and get to work. Really, this yard is full of one-of-a-kind treasures, I just have to put some muscle (er...muscles I didn't have, until we moved here) into getting them out and cleaning them up.
I don't even know why I care what the yard looks like. I could just water it and call it good. But I guess I like the feeling of restoring these things, I like feeling connected to the past that way, and I like doing the work and knowing that I'm improving things, even if it's a super slow process.
A few weeks ago, I came across a buried, hand-made paving stone, in which several polished red rocks are set sort of like jewels. It had been set by the fence, and I was just pulling some of the weeds there and saw a bit of the red through the dirt. I tried to pick it up but found it was part of this bigger thing, so out came the shovel. After I got it out, I sprayed the dirt off with the hose, and set it up against a tree in one of the flower beds.
There are things like that hidden all over the place here.
It's like an on-going mystery, and I want to solve it.