To most people, rocks are simply objects which are more or less useful, pretty, or unusual in some way. But, as it happens, rocks are also a written record of something that happened in the history of the earth. That mindshift, from thinking about rocks as objects to rocks as history, is a transformation that happens to every geologist. This book is the story of how that transformation happened to two people, a man and a woman, a process that occurred over many years.