A smooth, chalky white stone. Chipped hard on one side. Not so much sides as surfaces. Surfaces worn smooth. Egg sized and scratched with what could be iron. Pale sedimentary lines, it has seen some pressure.
Fields of stone baking behind the concession stand and car park. Landscape writ in stone, never know what you will find. Fossils, gneiss, limestone, granite.
Under the bleachers the stones are cool. Someone else has been here. Stones neatly aligned on a metal lip provide introspection for five or 50 year old.
Something in these million year old minerals. Laying there quiet, barely earning a glance. I pick another, mica winks at me beneath a scuff of algae.
Words in a sentence, these stones lay here – with depth, age, quickened by millennia into essence – brilliance without edge. Beauty understood only by those who know the language.
Unmoving, each has traveled farther than any of us. Each stone, each story, quickened hard. Unmoving, a million years down, a million years to go.
In the past I would have taken those stones home, added memory to my own landscape. Today I left them – not my story to change.
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