Rory first appeared on Instagram of Taisiya Styopina (her «biological mother») last year, on April 21. She was ready for adoption, and she was looking for her own family. And it doesn’t matter that she arrived in Prague only in July, her official birthday is considered to be the date of her first public appearance.
So, few days ago, on her first birthday Rory received a package of Japanese fabrics from Merchant & Mills (one day it will turn into new fancy clothes) and… stones. Beautiful stones, a whole set, almost like in the blog Ishinohito (Rory discovered it by accident, when she was allowed onto the Internet to look at the Milky Way and Pokémons, and, as it often happens, became interested in completely different things).
Rory didn’t change her mind and still wants to be an astronomer, but for now all that she has are atlases, night sky observations and a promise to visit Prague Planetarium one day.
It was clear that there was no chance to get a telescope this year, so, since Rory is not used to staying in a bad mood for a long time (and she’s also very pragmatic for her age, I have to admit), she decided to switch to something closer. Now she finds stones magical and extremely interesting. Constellations are good, but for the moment they are too far.
New hobby — here’s a matching gift.
Although Rory’s stones are not from a shore, but from a store (because the nearest Czech sea is in Croatia), they are quite suitable for starting a collection. And, more importantly, Rory thinks they are the best in the world.
Because stones can be a whole universe, depending on the beholder. Some of them resemble landscapes, with a horizon, sky and sea, others are like tiny green hills with trees or like the sky full of stars. There are planets (very badly deformed and distorted), cities inhabited by invisible men, mysterious messages from the past, though a lot of stones may look like illustrations in a children’s book made by another grown-up artist trying to introduce kids to art (but in vain) — these are not the most attractive ones (because in vain).
In other words, anyone starts philosophizing without a telescope.
Every stone is unique, every stone is precious, every stone is shaped by nature (there are exceptions, but what does it matter anyway?), and Rory intends to become the greatest stone collector. Because stones are cool (yep, they are).
Rory has a few pins with Totoro and three teddy bears, but these, well, really unique and valuable things are not serious enough (and it is evident, that, on the contrary, stones are very, very serious objects). However, they were useful for training, so now Rory is prepared for the field practice, and she already has ambitious plans.
One day the world will see Rory’s Own Museum of Pebbles. All she will have to do is to solemnly open it.
Rory read about museums in a book with a little teapot on the cover (The Beauty of Everyday Things, essays by Soetsu Yanagi, and it wasn’t a teapot, by the way): you just need to start collecting things you like, write interesting stories about them, not to let any randomness (select only what looks like stones, behaves like stones and keeps silent like stones; but to choose actual stones from the very beginning is the preferable option, of course), tell everyone that simple things are better than complex ones, and voilà — you have a valuable collection that can be shown to the world.
Since the stones are very simple (honestly, what could be simpler than stones? and here we ask gemologists not to answer this question), Rory is already confident of success.
Now she wants to learn how to use camera and to take pictures (or at least how to arrange pebbles so they glow in the sun, just like she saw on a website with strange and unclear language), how to distinguish better stones, and how to explain more clearly to others that even though she is a doll made of natural materials, she doesn’t necessarily need very natural gifts (like stones, for example), sometimes something made of plastic (and aluminium, and glass lenses…) is enough.
By the way, telescope can always be placed on the roof of the Pebble Museum. It will be even more interesting this way (but if next year the gift is wrong again, Rory will open a pancake cafe instead of observatory — she has already thought of that too, and this idea also sounds awesome).
