The Mysterious Chest of Sand Grains

One day, Nikita and Anya found an old wooden chest in the storage room that had belonged to their grandfather. It was locked, but the children asked their grandmother to show them what was inside. Their grandmother smiled and explained that their grandfather kept rare sand grains in this chest, collected from his travels to different corners of the world. "This isn't just sand," she said, "each grain is a piece of another country, another landscape."

Grandmother opened the chest, and the children saw small glass jars, each filled with sand of a unique color and texture. The first jar they picked up was filled with fine, golden sand. "This sand is from the Egyptian desert," said Grandmother. "There, it turns bright yellow under the blazing sun." The children examined the sand closely, imagining the sun warming it in the distant desert.

In another jar, they found pale, almost white sand. "This sand, your grandfather brought from the beaches of Australia," explained Grandmother. "It’s soft and very light because of the tiny particles of coral ground up by the waves." The children were amazed that beaches could be so different, and Grandmother told them that Australian sand was much lighter than the sand at their local lake.

The next jar held sand grains of a grayish-black shade. "This sand comes from the volcanic shores of Hawaii," Grandmother said. "It’s so dark because it’s made of cooled lava." The children imagined a volcano erupting and the lava hardening into dark sand. It felt like they were holding a piece of a faraway world.

The jars of sand grains seemed like an incredible way for the children to explore different parts of the world. Grandmother told them that each sand sample in the chest was a memory of their grandfather's travels and how he wanted to keep a small piece of every place he visited. Now the children understood that the world was full of diversity, and that each color and texture of sand told a story about nature, which could be completely different in every corner of the planet.

Since then, Nikita and Anya often asked Grandmother to open the chest so they could look at the sand grains again and learn more about our big, amazing world.