Crossing through the thicket of honeysuckle and valerian that line the path, my daughter and I step over decaying trunks and rusting time. The air is thick with jewelweed and mugwort. Before long, awaiting us in the distance, we are greeted by the elder rock. Perched midstream, waist deep in the song of water, they wear patches of time in the form of lichen and caddisfly exoskeletons, soaking in the high solstice sun.
The rock does not blink. They are a glacial erratic carved by time, when the Laurentide Ice Sheet breathed southward, and carried them forward like a sleeping child. The large bluestone was laid here, in the hollow of the woodland valley we call home, when the glaciers withdrew, shedding boulders like mold blooms. The rock arrived long before the cottonwood trees stood tall, before hop hornbeam roots tangled into muscle along the water’s edge, before we arrived with our fruit-heavy questions. We eagerly climb onto their broad back, laying our limbs along their cooled shoulders, pressing our ears against their skin, waiting to hear a lullaby or a slow geological heartbeat. Time spills differently here, it is not linear or tamed. Here, time beads like dew on spider silk. It pools.
Pressing our hearts to the rock’s patient ribs, we ask: how do we stay with change?
Over the years, the rock has watched us grow beside them, like a doting grandmother. My daughter, who first walked the stream as a toddler, cupping tadpoles, wet kneed, and river eyed, now steps sure footed, twelve years of life carried in her bones. She has learned from the elder rock how to stay and yet shift, to root and roam. Together perched upon the rock, we have seen mink move like river spells through moss. Watched eastern toads in their spring mating frenzy. Mother grebes herding their downy flotillas through quiet eddies. Bald eagles ride the sky mythically above the ravine. Eastern ribbon snakes flit through the water like ghazals. Once, even a black bear climbed down the mountain and bowed its head to the elderberry bush, bending in admiration of their sweetness.
Their wisdom is not rooted in remaining, but in being. In this way, the stream keeps making and unmaking the world. In how even a glacial boulder can learn to yield to water. In how a child becomes a current, then a tide, then something entirely unnamed. The rock never asks us to stay, only to return. To change and yet still return.
The stream, like the rock, is no disciple of permanence. Their language changes with the rain, the wind’s prayers in the canopy, and the heaving melt of spring. Algae blooms float like green ghost skin. The water moves with a rhythm that has nothing to do with clocks, only pulse, gravity, and flow. Even the trees change. Some winters take trees, others bring them down gently like exhaling grandmothers. The eastern hemlocks thin at the tips, threatened by woolly adelgid, weakening under a warmer sun. For now they stand and needle the light with green insistence. And so do we. We too, shaped by this place, by the rock’s unmoving presence, the geometry of dragonflies, and the way the stream rearranges memory with every flood.
Lining the streambank, the Japanese knotweed grows too. People call them invasive, a problem, something to be managed and removed. But the elder rock remembers differently. They speak of the knotweed as a migrant, as one who has traveled far. Not native, no, but even the glacial boulders were once strangers here. The knotweed came bearing something. A memory of the soil they left behind. They came with hunger, but also with medicine. The bees know. The pollinators crowd their late blooms when everything else has given up. The knotweed’s lesson appears clearer each season: some love arrives tangled and takes time to understand.
On the days leading up to the summer solstice, my daughter touches the rock’s surface and says: “They’re softer now.” And she’s right. The water has smoothed their form. We have smoothed them and they have smoothed us. We know the rock will not last forever. But we do not fear. Their wisdom is not rooted in remaining, but in being. In this way, the stream keeps making and unmaking the world. In how even a glacial boulder can learn to yield to water. In how a child becomes a current, then a tide, then something entirely unnamed. The rock never asks us to stay, only to return. To change and yet still return.
