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Our yard has always been a disaster; my brother, our neighbors and I used to play soccer out there as kids, leaving it looking a lot like the Sea of Tranquility. When my dad moved back in in 1988, he must have sodded the whole thing, because it looked like a fairway at Augusta for a while. But then it fell into disrepair, and the 30- and 40-foot-high trees make so much shade that grass has never really taken root.

Amy & I have talked for a while about getting some real landscaping done, but I decided to launch a pre-emptive strike yesterday and start beautifyin’ on my own. Little did I realize it would lead . . . to the end of the world!

I decided that several of the trees, with their blast-radius of shade, would be best served by mulch and a ring of rocks. After walking Rufus in the morning, I moved a number of rocks from the backyard to build a little (4-foot diameter) ring around one of the trees by the street. The temperature at 7am was amenable and the work went quickly. So it made perfect Bizarro sense to take a half day from work and build a much bigger ring around an island of trees in the middle of the afternoon when it was 87 degrees!

To be fair, it was exactly one hour of non-stop work, hauling rocks from the backyard and digging out embedded rocks from around that island of trees. I thought, “I sure am glad that I’m a trade magazine editor and not a landscaper!”

I had a funny recollection of my youth during the work. As I tossed some of the heavier rocks in the back yard into my wheelbarrow, they struck each other and gave off a smell of gunpowder. I have no idea if high sulfur content is a unique aspect to rocks around here, or if the rest of you have childhood memories of smashing two rocks together in an attempt at creating an explosion. All things considered, I find it remarkable that I managed not to lose any fingers or suffer brain damage as a kid.

In the front yard, I had to dig out a dozen or so rocks that were embedded in the area that I was trying to ring off. Rather than covering them over, I figured they could be used for the ring itself. The only problem was, some of these rocks were iceberg-like, with significant mass buried under the surface. I was able to pivot some of them along the ground out to the perimeter. To others, I said, “Screw you; you’re staying. Enjoy the mulch, bitches!”

I noticed that these had more lichen on them than the others, but again, I have no idea what that means. Outside of the fact that I live in the wake of a glacier’s retreat.

But it wasn’t these lichenous rocks that portended the end of the world. Nor was it the gunpowder-laden stones and their promise of Pinto-bumper explosions. It was The Hidden Rock.

While digging, I hauled up a large ovoid rock that was half-out of the ground. It was heavy, but not impossible to lift. Looking at it, I discovered that it had several long fissures on its surface. Already inspired by my childhood, I concluded the best thing to do would be to throw it down on another rock and wish that I was wearing my safety-glasses.

And the rock shattered. Well, it didn’t actually shatter; what shattered was the exterior shell of the rock. Like some fragile matrushka doll, what remained was a smoother rock (upper right), marred slightly by the impact that freed it, beside the shards of its carapace:

Sure, I’m given to flights of fancy and maybe there’s an easy geological explanation for this occurrence. But it’s clear to me that I discovered

a) one of the sefirot, surrounded by one of the qlipot,

b) the egg of Quetzalcoatl, the feathered serpent,

c) a meteor,

d) an early, failed attempt at the M&M concept,

e) a prehistoric spaceship, bearing small rocky people from their doomed planet, or

f) the Philosopher’s stone, which was never found because no one ever looks in New Jersey.

All we can know for sure is that it now helps round out the ring of rocks in my front yard, and that I really need to drink more water before working out in the yard in August.