It was just a bit of exposed rock, about the size of a salad plate, grayish-white and almost flat. We mowed right over it every week or two in the summer and forgot it instantly.

The summer my youngest was nine, he got curious and decided to dig it up. I came upon him in the back yard, hard at it with a spade. “I want to see how big it is," he said, flinging dirt in every direction. It occurred to me that this was a perfect occupation for an energetic boy, so I didn’t stop him. We could always re-seed the grass, I reasoned. And besides, I was a little curious myself.

It was bigger than he had expected. It sat in its pit on the hillside like an overgrown dinosaur’s egg, several feet across. It had weight. It had presence. It had history. Eons ago, in the last Ice Age, a receding glacier had deposited this boulder in what would someday become my backyard. If only it had set it down fifty feet to the east, I would have been perfectly happy. more >