AFTERWORD
Circle in the Heart of Stone
Christina Baldwin
There is a river cottage that has been in a friend’s family for generations, a summer home for the city folks built by the country cousins.
There is a ritual for getting here—a circuitous meandering off the interstate through several small towns, taking sharp-angled turns at the edges of cornfields, down one county road and then another, no street signs, a route they all know in their blood, and I by acquaintanceship and a lucky sense of direction.
There is a ritual for getting here—the driveway unmarked, a quarter mile of sandy parallel tire tracks between Grandpa Zimmer’s cornfield and the stand of scrub oak he cut for firewood before central heating came to the white frame house that sits on the rise at river’s edge.
There is a ritual for getting here—because in the middle of this drive there hides the remains of a granite boulder and everyone who comes, be they family or friend, must ease their car over this slab rock without gutt ing the mechanics and bleeding oil or gasoline on the sand. The rock is part of the ritual. You learn to turn at the white flag and go slow over that rock, or you’ll be getting the tow truck to take you back to town.
The boulder is navigable now, though I’ve watched my friend drop to her knees in an auto showroom and gauge the distance from floor to chassis, seeing this heirloom rock in her mind and not buying a new car that couldn’t make it to the cottage.
The boulder is navigable now because, summer after summer, when it was the size of a bathtub, as long and as high, Grandpa Zimmer spent his evenings straddling rock and working away at the surface with a diamond-headed auger, drilling small, round circles into the surface of the stone. And autumn after autumn, when the freeze came, Grandpa Zimmer filled those holes with buckets of river water. And winter after winter, the ice did its work and blew up more of his boulder. Bit by bit. Water set on stone.
Water crystals expanding against granite seem no match for each other, yet the soft, burbling river sets to its winter task: persistent, changing form to meet the need. The need here, in the bowel of the rock, is to bore within, to be the circle in the center of the stone.
It is autumn on our planet. We stand in the middle of great change and cannot see what transformation is coming any more than the river can see itself cooling at the end of summer.
The boulder is the patriarchal way; the auger is the energy of circle boring into granite; and you and I are the water at work. You and I are the water, willing to set ourselves to the next task.
You and I are the water, H2O, the molecular heart of the planet. Eighty percent of everything on earth is water. You and I are the water. We are the majority of everything. We can be steam, be river, be rain and rainbow. We can be ice, talking to the granite one molecule at a time, convincing the rock to let go, to let itself be slivered: to be slivered small enough to be carried by water, to become sand, to rest on the banks of a river.
Come sit with me on this boulder. We will take turns boring the auger into stone. It is not such hard work when more than one is working. We will tell each other stories. We will help each other with the tasks of our lives. We will wear this stone away without violence. There has been enough violence.
We will talk to the granite.
We will not give up.
We will be like drops of water falling on a stone.