Here, in the deepest part of winter, the roads and the paths and the trails are framed by walls of snow. Even from a moving car, the layers are both visible and remarkable.

The snow’s layers tell a story spanning a few months but they will evaporate with the spring sun. But underneath that snow is rock and its layers tell tales on the passage of eons. The kind of inconceivable time that surpasses both the formation of rivers and their dissolution of rivers.

In turn, those rivers shape stone by their single-minded determination to find and follow the flow of gravity. Water’s unutterable power has brought down mountain ranges one polished grain of sand at a time.

The snow’s layers are a polaroid. The rock’s layers are the large format camera tucked in the back corner of your grandfather’s basement. But I have layers too and they are something in between.

They are not just a season’s worth of history. Nor are they generation-spanning, life-altering, slow-motion panoramas of time. They exist in the middle; hundreds of weeks but not tens of thousands.

They also aren’t as visible. With rock, you can throw dynamite into a crack to make way for a highway and expose prehistory to the open air. But you can’t cut me in half and see where the good years were - I am neither as simple as a tree ring, nor as important.

I am not as definable as a stratigraphic column. I can’t say, oh - that was the Precambrian, my infancy. But if I could, what events would be the fault lines? Where would the unconformities be, those breaks in the record with no logical explanation?

But whether we are speaking of snow or me or the rocks, even the harshest of conditions each of us face will settle over time. The length of that time can be wildly different but in the end, we all have a past and it is written on us.

My fingerprints mark me for what I was then and what I still am. Dirt and sand and mud and silt have wedged between those whorls and they’ve all washed away, leaving me here with a past and a story and a self.

And here I am, walking on the snow on top of rock on top of the earth’s core, made of layers of stuff from the stars.

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