These balls you see scattered about my site and in my product photography are called iron ore pellets. They littered the train tracks in the sleepy mining town where I grew up in Northern Michigan.
As a little girl I would wander as I waited for my mom to run errands and visit friends in the small strip of consolidated shops we called downtown. It was really only about ten stores then including a bank, a real estate office, a grocery store and a movie theatre. I would sometimes walk along the train tracks that ran square through our town and I would pick up these little iron ore pellets, as I say dreamed about when I'd see bigger places and things, I'd look at them and wonder how they came to be.
I would think about how deep into the earth the miners had to dig to extract the ore before refining into these little round baubles and how the earth had heater and formed and fused the metal with rock in the first place. I'd pretend they were as valuable as gold. I loved the irony aubergine dust they left behind on my hands and how they sometimes could look blue, purple and grey all at the same time. I would stuff them in my pockets with plans to try to pass them off as fancy marbles and gems later with my friends in the schoolyard.
The town I grew up in was un-ironically called Iron Mountain and the landscape around it dotted with open pit mines and and abandoned shafts long ago closed and naturally filled over time with icy crystal clear water as the mines collapsed and tunnels flooded. As kids, we would ignore warning signs that said "danger, underwater currents and debris" and climb through holes in fences to dive into the cold water off the shale rock cliffs left behind by the back-breaking rock-breaking work the miners had done long before we arrived on a hot summer day.
When I started to think about what to call my little company, I remembered those pellets, the mines and summer days. I recalled how I had thought that all the train tracks in the world were lined with them until I left my little town only to discover they were unique to my roots. They had only come to rest in that corner of the world because they had rolled off railroad cars as they transported the ore to new places to be combined with other metals to make stronger materials called alloys, like steel and brass.
We all start out life like an ore; untouched, raw deep in the earth. As we grow, the experiences around us erode and extract us from the safety of the bedrock. And like those little pellets, we journey. Sometimes we fall off the back of the train car close to home and remain ore, beautiful in its own right, content to stay and rest in a familiar place. But sometimes we stay on the ride a bit longer seeking more, going further and farther away experiencing the unknown and bearing ghe the scratches of pain risk can sometimes bring. But with each turn of the rail car wheel we gain strength as we combine our lives with new people, places, experiences and things. And suddenly one day we find ourselves an alloy, stronger, with new properties and capacities we didn't even know we had within us.
From Iron Mountain, Michigan to Portland, Oregon. Still ignoring the warning signs, roots extracted but still intact. An Ore to and Alloy.
