Back in the colorful summer days of my youth, my sister and I had a pair of “thinking rocks” in the beaten terrain behind our house. They were two flat slabs of granite, spaced about ten meters apart, with hers a bit higher up than mine on the natural slope of the earth. Hers was a great deal flatter, almost to the point of concaveness, and a solid grey undertone powdered with a dusty white veneer, while mine was more of a peach color, with a rough surface that bristled with parsley-like vegetation wherever it cracked. Whenever we were bored in the summertime, or indeed, even in the lukewarm winters of North Carolina, we would go down there for hours on end, just enjoying.


But the stones weren’t in the deep and serene forest. Rather, they were in the rocky reservoir carved out of nature that ran along the steel I-beam and cement sound wall separating our ever-shrinking world from the freeway. But in the presence of two adolescent minds, they were in the Grand Canyon. They were on the beach. They were in the deep wood, where the omnipresent chirp of bird calls in the mental operas of our childhood drowned out the comparatively weak sounds of the cars passing by.