Cousin Freddie spent ever summer in Baltimore, Maryland visiting his mother and sister and while her was there he tended to increase his education and ours immeasurably.
One summer when he returned, he told us you could find pearls in seafood.  Now he was only slightly mixed up and should have told us that you could find pearls in oysters, but you have to remember he was only eight.
Living on Indian Creek, there wasn’t a surplus of oysters to be found.  Lord knows the creeks didn’t have them and neither did the grocery stores.  So the closest thing we could find was crawdads.
Now to children, logic dictated if pearls were in seafood, then a crawdad was the closest thing we could had.  There was an abundance of crawdads in the branch that ran out of the Cavenger Hollow by our house into Indian Creek.
Peggy Sue, Freddie, Bruce and I took a burlap sack and each of us took a bucket and up the branch we went.  We took the sack and went up under the ledges of rock that ran along the banks.  We dipped the sack in the water and brought it up under the ledges where the crawdads scurried  when something disturbed them.  We would then lift the sack filled with crawdads and drain out the water and in a short time we had filled our buckets . 
At our house we had a set of old concrete steps that set out in the middle of a little walnut grove where we always played.  We each found a smooth creek rock and began our endeavor.  We took the crawdads, one at a time, pounding them into oblivion trying to find one pearl.  We pounded hundreds of crawdads and guess what, not a pearl did we find.  . 

by Nancy Clark Brown

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