Year-marking stone

The Year-marking stone is the community’s physical calendar: a smooth rock surface on which Ish cuts each new year’s number and where the group gathers to name the year. What begins as a mark for the first completed cycle of the sun becomes a repeated public ceremony, preserving a sense of historical continuity while allowing the community to remember each year in its own words.

Setting and first mark

The stone lies on a hillside near the house on San Lupo Drive, in an area that had once been a small public park. Tall rocks rise nearby, two leaning together to form a high, narrow cave. On the smooth sloping surface selected for the calendar, small holes remain from people of an earlier age who pounded acorns into meal. The place therefore bears traces of human use from before the period the survivors call The Old Times, even before it receives its new role as a record of their years.

After the seasons have passed and the sun has moved south of the Golden Gate for a second time, Ish and Em climb to the rocks on a calm, sunny midwinter afternoon. Em carries their baby and is pregnant again; Ish brings his hammer and a cold-chisel. While Em sits in the sun and nurses the child, Ish cuts the first numeral into the stone. He shapes the upright line with a serif at its base and a small hook at the top, giving it the form of the printed number 1 he remembers. The decorative care and the ceremony surrounding the work mark this not merely as a count, but as the end of the community’s first complete circuit of the sun.

When the baby has finished feeding, Ish and Em sit together beside him. Ish identifies the beginning of Year One, while Em associates the year with the baby, offering a personal name easier to remember than a number. From the outset, the stone holds both kinds of memory: the ordered sequence of time and the lived experience that gives a particular year its meaning.

A calendar becomes a communal ritual

The practice grows out of Ish’s recognition that keeping time matters beyond practical calculation. He comes to think of time as history, history as tradition, and tradition as civilization; if continuity is lost, he fears it may not be recovered. The stone gives that concern a visible form. A year that might otherwise pass without a durable record is inscribed in a place the community can return to, and the act of marking it makes the calendar a shared undertaking rather than Ish’s private notation.

At the winter solstice, people gather at the rock to cut the new numeral and decide what to call the year. Ish performs the carving with hammer and chisel, but naming increasingly involves the group. On one occasion, after a year marked by dead cattle and grasshoppers, the people consider more hopeful and more painful possibilities before settling on Bad Year. The chosen name preserves the year’s hardship in collective memory instead of allowing its events to disappear into an undifferentiated past.

The annual gathering can also let younger members shape the record. In Year 10, when Ish begins to carve, children suggest naming the year for fishing: the Bay has been full of striped bass, and fishing has supplied both food and shared enjoyment. Their proposal makes an ordinary pleasure worthy of remembrance. The stone’s chronicle is therefore not limited to disasters or milestones; its names register what the community itself considers significant.

Numbered years, changing generations

The carved sequence gives the survivors a common measure as the community changes. By Year 21, they number thirty-six: seven older people, Evie, twenty-one members of the second generation, and seven of the third. Ish considers a name celebrating coming of age, but the year is instead remembered for Joey’s unexpected reading ability. At nine, the youngest son of Ish and Em reads quickly, accurately, and with pleasure. The occasion deepens Ish’s awareness of his son’s intellectual promise, showing how the annual naming and numbering can link communal time to an intimate discovery.

The stone also gathers people through a holiday that combines elements of Christmas and New Year’s from The Old Times with traditions belonging to the survivors themselves. As the sun reaches the southern limit of its course, the community prepares for the celebration and the new carving. On the day the twenty-second year begins, everyone gathers, including mothers with their youngest babies. Ish cuts 22 below 21; those old enough to speak call out the New Year greeting inherited from the earlier world. The sequence of numerals is cumulative, each new figure physically extending the record already made.

Record, memory, and uncertainty

The ritual is not a guarantee that the community can preserve every part of its past. Ish’s hope that the survivors will maintain continuity is shadowed by his concern that timekeeping may already have been neglected elsewhere. The stone offers one answer to that vulnerability: a durable surface, a repeated gathering, and a practice that can be observed and learned across generations. Yet its history is also selective. The number records sequence; the name chooses which experience will stand for the year.

At the end of the twenty-second year, the familiar procedure reaches an uncertain pause. After Ish carves 22 and the greeting is exchanged, he asks for the year’s name, but the people fall silent. Ezra is finally the first to speak. The surviving account establishes the hesitation and Ezra’s response, but not the resulting name. That moment makes visible a limit built into the stone’s purpose: numbers can be cut in order, while shared meaning requires people willing to supply it.