10: Change

In an instant, nothing changes. In our garden, I dig down twenty inches at the most. There, I reach a layer of shiny black clay. This clay derives from a little way into the Holocene, the present age, when this land was under the San Francisco Bay. Even in twenty seconds a myriad of societies slough off their tiny citizens to contribute to that black clay. Dinosaurs and ammonites disappeared sixty-five million years before, at the end of the Cretaceous. That could be twelve thousand feet below my garden, sediments accumulating slowly over the bones and shells.

Pocket watch