There’s a trail near my house.  I’ve known of its existence since we moved in nearly a decade ago—its entrance is marked by a charmingly rustic carved wooden sign—but it was only under the scent-motivated encouragement of Jackie (the retriever mix also known as my parents’ favorite child) that I first walked along it, several weeks ago.  And with Jackie on the end of the leash and the autumn sun quickly setting, that first walk was a quick one.  So it’s only been recently that I’ve taken time to walk the trail more slowly, for my own purposes.  And so too, it was only today that I took the time to parse an image that had struck me only as a casual curiosity on earlier trips.

Roughly halfway around the mile-long loop that is the trail, a tree has fallen over into the Yellow Breeches Creek, its clutching roots exposed to the air for what must be years now.  And in those roots, like huge unpolished jewels in a woodworker’s setting, sit several fist-sized chunks of shale.

The first time I noticed them I smiled, picturing boyhood summers in similarly wooded settings, when friends and I built cities out of rocks and sticks.  Wedging these shale chunks into the tree roots would have made perfect hide-outs for our action figures as they prepared to ambush their foes.

But today as I approached the shaly roots, I stopped.  And as the crunch-crunch of my feet in the dry leaves yielded to the airy silence of the woods, I looked more closely.  Images of children with toys and bored teenagers faded away as I realized the truth: this was a natural occurrence.  The tree roots had grown around the rocks.  These stones weren’t placed there after the tree fell; instead, the roots must have broken through a layer of shale as they grew downward into the creek bank.  The insistent force of their growth was enough to shatter the rock, but not enough to completely displace it.  Over the course of years the stone and the wood yielded to one another in turns, creating this accidental collage of wood and stone that now, once the tree had reached the end of its lifespan and fallen, reached upward toward the sun, waiting to be noticed and appreciated by passers-by.

So I stood for a while, in appreciation and gratitude.  And then I continued on my way.