William Anthony

Hunkered down, here on the Maine coast, as in Boccaccio’s Decameron, waiting for this new pestilence to pass, I commenced thinking about the glacier-scraped granite bedrock that lies beneath most of Maine. Its evidence is everywhere, if you look for it: the unforgiving rock ledges along Maine’s jagged coast—the stone walls that wend their way along back roads and over old stone-stubbled pastures—here and there, the huge erratics left millennia ago by melting glaciers—and, after the summer people have left, when the sea turns gray as cold steel, there are the small stones I consider as I stroll Pemaquid Beach, lost in thought.

We humans stop to pick up beach stones for many reasons: we may take pleasure in a stone’s shape or its color or perhaps we simply like the feel of a stone in our hand. But if I take a stone home, its beauty dims and the sea-soaked stone that was dark black when wet will dry out, lifeless, at home. In time, I will forget whatever first drew my eyes to that stone and why I stopped to pluck that stone from the cold grasp of sand, crushed shells and seaweed, as if trying to rescue it from some anonymous fate.

The time-rounded sea-tossed beach stone in this photograph, sits on a piece of driftwood on the mantel over the fireplace in the cottage. It is a natural sculpture, a memento mori, millions of years old, that persists in this age of silicon impermanence and instant obsolescence. It is a reminder that my reflections on this stone’s beauty are as ephemeral as a summer dragonfly. Soon enough I will again be but minerals and dust, this stones’ distant relative.