Don Corley devotes himself to daily walks through his family's meadowland, seeking solace from the troubling questions of abandonment that surround his mother's mysterious death when he was a kid: Was it suicide or an accident? So caught in the past, he is blind to the land's well-being as a warming climate threatens until a stranger, Sakura Gonzalez, who claims ancestral ties to the land, appears and unleashes family secrets, forcing him to confront a drying, fading meadow. As they toil there one summer, he tangles with matters of the heart, land ownership, and ways to sustain the meadowland's past as well as its future.

A family drama set in the American Southwest, The Geology of Secrets explores the power of the past and how it can fuel denial within our relationships with those we care for and the places we choose to call ours. Interconnectedness and land use serve as high-stakes issues in the face of climate threat involving how to sustain or restore native ecosystems in our country and beyond through science and the endangered wisdom of indigenous and multicultural stories.