12:45 p.m. - 2006-10-03
Slag...hard stuff coal sticks to

I had a heavenly body but now it's just a lump

Restoring our yard from the wild thicket it has become over the past 70 years has been like going on our very own archeological dig. We are finding multi layers of paving stones, childrens toys and balls as well as more rocks than the Irish coast. It seems as if each former owner put their landscape projects right on top of the old ones.

The last area of the yard to go through demolition was the back North/East corner where English Ivy and some other predatory ivy grew together to crowd out every other plant and form a thicket that had to be peeled back like an old carpet, with me pulling back the carpet while Mike, weilding the line trimmer, cut the roots. The stuff rolled up, just like a carpet and beneath we found old buried landscape edging, crumbling paving stones, smooth hunks of granite boulders and many many childrens balls.

We were putting the granite boulders in the wheel barrow and moving them to various parts of the garden when Mike picked up something that looked and felt like a hunk of iron. Upon further examination, we decided that we had a meteorite. A lump of iron with a glassy, pitted, hunk of something black fused to it....a fusion crust is what scientists called it.

We showed it around. A few neighbors agreed that it indeed must be a meteorite. The internet pictures I saw pretty much convinced me that I had a very very valuable chunk of outerspace. I envisioned selling it for a million dollars, quitting my job, getting my face in the paper....surely this was indeed a gift from heaven.

The internet site told me to first check it with a magnet, but to use a compass, as a magnet would change it's magentic field and destroy valuable scientific data. We didn't have a compass so we were able to believe a little longer.

I mentioned it at work. One of the guys expressed interest in it, so I brought it in wrapped securely in 5 plastic grocery bags. Before I could tell about needing a compass to test it instead of a magnet, he pulled out a magnet he kept in a drawer, tested for a reaction and................................
It didn't stick.

I still desperately wanted to believe in my meteorite and theorized that maybe it wasn't a powerful enough magnet or that maybe my meteorite didn't have as much iron and needed to be tested in some other way...I was also disheartened that the valuable scientific data was now ruined.

My boss walked in. "You want to see my meteorite?" I asked, carefully taking it out of the Jewel bag.

Before I could get it half way out he said with absolute certainty, "That's not a meteorite...that's a lump of coal attached to a piece of slag."

I could deny it no longer....instead of a valuable piece of heaven, I had a worthless lump of coal attached to something as disgusting sounding as slag....my coalminer forebearers would be shaking their heads at my ignorance of something that they saw every day of their lives.

I must have looked pretty dejected,because my boss said "but if you want to keep the dream alive, you could believe that if you cracked it open, you would find a diamond in the middle." He walked away laughing.

I dragged my sorry lump of slag home.

P. I. Yarnsmith

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