When I was 12, I spent a hot summer day digging up a rock in my yard. It kept dinging my mower blade, and I was sick of it. But annoyance quickly turned to fascination as I realized that this rock was rectangular, with beveled edges. Its placement there at the edge of our old cobbled driveway was no accident of nature. It's a gravestone, I thought. In fact, it was a carriage step, a remnant of the 19th-century house that once stood on our land. A simple thing, that stone, but it rocked my world, filling me with a sense of discovery so profound that even now my stomach gets fluttery when I think of it.
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