Girl sells geodes at farmers market

Twelve-year-old Anna Rockhold tells her friends that geodes are so much more than ?rocks.? Rockhold is especially fond of geodes, and has collected them since she was 7 years old. On Thursday, she put them on display and up for sale at the Washington Farmers Market.

Anna lives in Washington over the summer with her father, Shawn Rockhold. One of their favorite pastimes is to look for geodes around local lakes. Anna?s favorite place to look for geodes is the aptly named Geode Lake in southeast Iowa.

?I find the geodes where there is clay, and where the water used to be,? said Anna. ?All of these geodes (at her booth) are from Lake Geode. I went one time and got a lot of them. I didn?t want to bring all of them here.?

Geodes come from rock formations that occur in volcanic and sedimentary rocks. The outside of a geode is usually made of limestone and looks just like any other rock. The inside of the rock, however, is a colorful quartz crystal. Some geodes are hollow, while others are completely solid.

The geodes on display at Anna?s booth ranged in color from white to gray to orange to red. Anna said the most common color in her geodes is white, and those are usually the solid ones. Her favorite geode color is orange because those are rare.

Cracking open a geode is not an easy task. Shawn once tried to cut a geode open with a table saw and the rock flew right off the platform.

Anna said, ?You take a hammer and a chisel and you beat on it.?

?And you have to dress up like a caveman,? added Shawn.

?I find the geodes, then my dad splits them and my grandma helps,? said Anna.

Her grandmother, Connie Rockhold of Washington, was the one who encouraged her to sell the geodes at the farmers market. Anna has spent the summer in Washington and has gone to the market nearly every week. Anna explained that she decided to sell her geodes because she was proud of them and because ?I needed money.?

Anna had a few dozen geodes of various sizes on display Thursday. Most of them were split open to reveal their beautiful interior. Others were left in their original state.

?I didn?t crack all of them because some people like surprises,? said Anna.

Anna said her customers got quite a bargain.

?When I started out, the geodes were worth $200 together,? she said. ?I marked them down cheap.?

Shawn said, ?I?m teaching her to be a capitalist.?

While Anna was chatting with one customer, her father completed a sale with another. He handed Anna the dollar bills and said, ?You?ve got to learn how to make change.?

Anna spends the school year in Kingsport, Tenn., where she lives with her mother, Adeline Greer. She visits many a creek in Tennessee but so far she has not found any geodes near rivers or lakes. The geodes she has seen in Tennessee have been dyed. Furthermore, she said she?s mostly keen on the geodes in southeast Iowa and Illinois.

?There might be some in Tennessee but I?m not interested in those,? said Anna. ?I?m interested in the Keokuk geodes.?

Unfortunately for geode-lovers, Thursday was the first and last time Anna will have sold her rocks this year. She leaves for Tennessee on Saturday.

Anna said she wanted to serve freshly squeezed lemonade at her geode booth, but unfortunately, ?there is no way to keep it cool.?

Apart from collecting colorful rocks, Anna enjoys cooking and painting. She once dreamt of being a ?professional kid artist.? She said her favorite kind of food to cook is ?dinner food.?