I was rummaging through some of my old television video files the other day.
I ran across a story I filmed several years ago at the Mississippi Petrified Forest near Flora in Madison County. In that story I said the only reason anybody in Mississippi doesn’t have petrified wood in their rock collection is because they just don’t want any. The wood certainly isn’t that hard to find. Almost any creek or river gravel bed will have some.
The stone logs in the Petrified Forest came from somewhere up in the Appalachians. The theory is they were washed here in a giant flood and were buried for eons under sand. A lot of what you find in rivers and creeks in Mississippi is petrified palm. A geologist told me that it grew here a long, long time ago.
My grandfather’s headstone is made from a petrified stump. He was intrigued by pretty much everything. So, when he found a huge hunk of petrified wood in a creek bottom in Northeast Mississippi, he got a tractor and drug it back to the house. For years it sat at the end of the front porch. We cousins used it as a launch pad when we jumped off the porch playing tag.
At some point, granddaddy told grandmother that he wanted to use the stump as his headstone. I suspect by that time she had quit asking “what on earth for” every time he came up with another idea. So, she patiently listened as he explained why.
Grandaddy — a timber man — had worked in wood all his life. He surveyed timber in Tennessee when he was young. Running and owning sawmills later in life, he reasoned it would be fitting to have a petrified headstone as a memento of his life’s endeavor.
Grandmother didn’t pay too much attention until a few years later when a stonemason came to the house and attached granddaddy’s name and birthdate to the face of the petrified stump.
Granddaddy called grandmother to come out and see what she thought. She wiped her hands on a dishtowel as she came out of the kitchen and looked at the stump and his name. Granddaddy reminded her that he had worked in wood, and this would be a good testimonial to his life. Grandmother grunted and said, “Well, if that’s the case, when I die, y’all can just take the oven door off the stove for my grave marker.”
The stone logs in the Petrified Forest came from somewhere up in the Appalachians. The theory is they were washed here in a giant flood and were buried for eons under sand. A lot of what you find in rivers and creeks in Mississippi is petrified palm.
I’m reminded of that story and many more of my family tales every year about this time because we spent so many Thanksgivings and Christmases at my grandparents, along with uncles, aunts, and a small army of cousins.
The greatest gift I ever received was to be born into a storytelling family who gathered at the holidays to tell those stories to one another.
