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The river is down and took the granddaughters to wade in the shallows looking for mother of pearl mussels(clam) with the dogs and my daughter. We have an island they call "seashell island". Well you can wade without worrying about mud because it has a clean gravel bottom. There are live mussels in the shallow water. My oldest granddaughter found a mussel opened but dead with most of the meat eaten. When she handed it to me I look in and there is a damn pearl. It is small and less than a 1/4 of a caret, so I pull the meat away and this small imperfect pearl. I have been looking for freshwater pearls since I was a kid and never found one. I looked on ebay and realized that people are still looking for freshwater pearls.
We decided we were going to get a necklace blank and glue her pearl to a necklace. She will keep it in a prescription bottle for now.
I visited my mother's friend in Tuscon Arizona this spring, and she remembers when she was eight going with her uncle to "clam". They had a flat bottomed boat with rows of poles with cluster hooks which they would drag and the mussels would clamp down and they would fill the bottom of the boat with their catch. The uncle lived in the wild, and she stayed in his tent as it was the early days of the depression, and he would sell the shells by the ton, the meat to pig farmers, and he had a jar where he collected the pearls. She remembers at 8 squishing the meat for pearls before throwing it in the barrel for the pigs. The shells were trucked over to Muscatine Iowa button factory where the mother of pearl was punched out for buttons on high end shirts.
The granddaughters are excited and want to go back out, but I tire too quickly to do it again today, but this was an exciting day.
We decided we were going to get a necklace blank and glue her pearl to a necklace. She will keep it in a prescription bottle for now.
I visited my mother's friend in Tuscon Arizona this spring, and she remembers when she was eight going with her uncle to "clam". They had a flat bottomed boat with rows of poles with cluster hooks which they would drag and the mussels would clamp down and they would fill the bottom of the boat with their catch. The uncle lived in the wild, and she stayed in his tent as it was the early days of the depression, and he would sell the shells by the ton, the meat to pig farmers, and he had a jar where he collected the pearls. She remembers at 8 squishing the meat for pearls before throwing it in the barrel for the pigs. The shells were trucked over to Muscatine Iowa button factory where the mother of pearl was punched out for buttons on high end shirts.
The granddaughters are excited and want to go back out, but I tire too quickly to do it again today, but this was an exciting day.
Last edited by 2seaoat on 8/1/2015, 6:42 pm; edited 1 time in total
