My Love Affair with Beads

Part One---The Archeological Dig
The summer after 4th grade, my family lived in a trailer house on an abandoned scout camp. My dad's service group had purchased this old camp, and I don't remember exactly why we had to live there for the summer. Probably since my dad had summers off (he was in education before retirement), he was being the handy-man fixing things. All I remember is it was one of the best times of my childhood. My brother and I would hike, fish, and in general have tons of adventures. We stayed out of the dilapidated buildings for the most part, since that was the rule, except the bath houses (when ya gotta go--ya gotta go!), and the 'mess hall' which had a library upstairs where we 'rescued' several old books.
My favorite part was that somewhere in all the adventures, I discovered some beads, just under the top layer of dirt!! I dug around a bit, and found a few more. Went back the next day and dug around a bit more, and found a few more. I went back every few days the rest of the summer, and by the end, I had a little butter dish 1/2 full of all different colors and sizes of what I was sure were Indian beads. They were like no other beads I had ever seen, not plastic cheap-o beads, some even striped! I imagined all summer the native people who stitched these beads onto moccasins, or headbands, and dropped a few around.
I didn't find out until many years later that I found these beads outside the cabin that in scout camp days had been the arts and crafts cabin. But I still figured that could just be a coincidence, and that some how, the kids at the scout camp had never found these Indian beads.
The butter dish is still somewhere in my parent's house. I never made them into anything, they were too special. And they started me on my life-long love affair with tiny bits of glass, metal, and/or clay with holes in them.
I little bit I wrote 2-3 years ago on an old blog