The calf lot was just beyond the backyard, adjacent to the barn when I was growing up. This was the “nursery” for the milk cow, so it was often empty.

Inside the fence there was a rock. What I thought of as a massive, huge, immense rock that lay flat and was vaguely heart-shaped. I would play house there and it often became my most luxurious bed.

The rock is still there, although the fence is gone and there aren’t any milk cows these days. But somehow that flat boulder of a play bed has been reduced to a mere stone. Largish I suppose, but nothing impressive.

It’s the same rock–I know it is–and yet it isn’t. That childhood lens has disappeared. I suppose I’ve grown out of it, shed it like old skin.

But still, I can stand on that rock in the morning sun looking down the lens of the years and remember what it was like to make a magnificent bed of stone.

Now that’s a skill worth remembering.