The Michigan Puddingstone

 By Steven Wade Veatch

 

I saw the stone on a long furrow, after the farmer’s spring plow,

like a glob of pudding packed with raisins, nuts, and bits of cranberry.

When I picked it up, I held eons of time.

 

As I wondered how the stone looked long ago, it broke its silence

and whispered its ancient origin, from an era when rushing streams

tumbled rock fragments, in a wild dance over time’s expanse.

 

As the days passed by, slowing water scattered pebbles on sand

and mixed them. Over time the material hardened into a rock

with a chaotic fabric of colorful stones cemented by sugary grains of white quartz.

 

More time, then more time, and with heat and pressure

it became quartzite,

a metamorphic rock,

a puddingstone.

 

And then more change, and the days grew gray, cloudy, and cold,

with dark, blowing winds. Glacial ice crept south and plucked

this stone from Ontario’s bedrock

and carried it away.

 

The climate shifted, the blue ice melted, and the stone released

on a quiet Michigan landscape for me to find 12 centuries later.

I put the stone back down, where agents of weathering

and time will change it once more, breaking

it down to its original ingredients.

 

The puddingstone makes me pause and ponder,

and I am here to say the only true constant

is endless change. Nothing stays the same,

not time,

climate,

the puddingstone,

                        or even me.

An unpolished puddingstone from Michigan. Some puddingstones contain trace amounts of gold and diamonds. These rocks are commonly found just after farmers plow their fields in Michigan. Puddingstones were brought to Michigan by Ice Age glaciers. A Jo Beckwith specimen. Photo by S. W. Veatch.

First published in the Betsie Current.