A week ago, on the last day of classes, we were asked to bring in an item for a sharing circle. This was my item. (I admit that it's a little bizarre to have a piece of stone that lives in a Tiffany & Co. box.) It is a side scraper from the excavation I was part of about seven years ago as part of an anthropology class in France. I like to say that "A Neandertal made this side scraper just for me!" Normally this kind of item would not be taken away from the site, but we had had to have a cave-y part of the site demolished for safety reasons, and this was found in the rubble. I was shocked and honored that the professor of the class decided that I should be the owner of this artifact, and not someone who had been more academically successful that summer. He chose me not because I was an excellent student, but because I had played "mommy" for a large part of the summer (cooking and care-taking as I am apt to do). Besides the fact that it's supercool to own a genuine Mousterian tool, it was even cooler to be recognized for something during that period of time, a time before I recognized that there was anything that I was good at.