One of my favorite road-trip memories is “mud-puddling” in western North Carolina. We had followed signs that lured us in with the promise of gemstones practically free for the taking. The space we wandered into looked like a roadside picnic area, and seemed ideal for the kind of lazy afternoon we had in mind. We each purchased buckets of dirt-covered rocks for a small fee, and then claimed our places along
a bench in front of a trough of running water.
While sunshine dappled the green of the surrounding hills, my best friend and I reverted back to one of the great delights of childhood: mucking about. We played in the muddy water, washing off our piles of rocks, convinced each time that the natural beauty of a stone was revealed that we had discovered a fabulous treasure. Could this be a ruby? An emerald? A sapphire?
We left a few hours later with nothing more than a pile of pretty rocks. But we had found something much more valuable in our treasure hunt than a gemstone: one perfect afternoon, reclaimed briefly from a childhood we’d both left behind long before.
Words are the treasures I’ve carried forward with me from that childhood; I’ve been collecting my favorites for most of my life: Collywobbles. Lugubrious. Gobbledygook. Insouciance.
Why not spend a few moments on a perfect afternoon taking your students on a linguistic treasure hunt? Ask them to them crack open the dictionary and write down one or more new word “gems” and their meanings. Have them use these new-found words to inspire their own poems, or create a collective class poem by swirling all the words together.
I’ve made a career out of proving that there are lots of treasures to be found when you go mucking about amidst
words.