Everything that we humans experience happens at a particular place and time. The world is teeming with layer upon layer of human experiences — large and small, memorable and not.

There are intersections, stretches of sidewalk, rooms in buildings — you name it — all freighted. There are places that I walk through unknowing, where others pause, remembering a face, a conversation, a joy or a pain.

Layer upon layer.

I think about  a bedroom in Pennsylvania. There my mother woke in the middle of a long ago January night. She was in the throes of an asthma/heart attack that took her life. Now someone else lives in that house and sleeps in that room.

Places where things have happened.

It’s not always big, life-altering things, either. Everything we’ve touched, every singular moment is a kind of anniversary. Take an early spring evening on the deck listening to the first peepers and watching Caleb and Ruby explore the field. This happened once and is layered on this dawn-lit deck, along with birthday celebrations and snowstorms — moments piled through decades of seasons.

If we could be geologists of the invisible, what would we discover?