Stone Wall

Every week D visits his father who lives in a very small town in rural New York.  His father still lives in the home in which D and his sisters grew up.  As you look at the house from the sidewalk (its actually a cement walkway now instead of the old slate slabs that were there when I first visited), there is a large house to the left which is almost on top of the creek that meanders its way through the town. 

As you would expect, that creek has meandered for centuries and has deposited stone in the fields that border it now and may once have formed the creek bed in the past.  Farmers and homeowners in the area find these stones all over their land.  The stones are not the cobblestones used in the northwestern part of the state in homes and municipal buildings (even in our own area there are cobblestone buildings that are still standing).  The stones that are found in D's home town are flat with rounded edges.  If you look at the photograph below, you can see the stones in the wall and contrast it with the stone above the wall that is between two oak trees.  The upper stone is local - all rough, sharp points, uneven thickness, gouges, and humps (painful to move!).

Earlier this summer, D asked his father's next door neighbor (the one close to the creek) if he would pile the flattest of the stones he was removing from his fields on the edge of Dad's driveway.  It was easy enough to do and a great way to get rid of unwanted stone, so the neighbor obliged.  Week by week D would pile stones in the trunk of our car then drive home unload and pile them in a corner of our driveway.  When he had enough, he started to build the wall you see in the pictures.

Today I took several photographs of his finished work so they could be sent to his father to show him what he had done with "all those rocks".  Didn't D do a wonderful job?  I love the way it looks - so much that you're going to have to look at some more photos:

Earlier I spent some time re-reading Robert Frost's poem about stone walls because I thought I would quote some of it here, and I don't know it by heart.  In my wanderings through sites mentioning the poem, I came across this entry from a blog and thought you might enjoy this, also:

http://webnerhouse.com/2011/06/22/on-stone-walls-and-robert-frost/

On Stone Walls And Robert Frost

June 22, 2011 by webnerbob

The Lake Champlain region of upstate New York feels, to me at least, more like New England than like the mid-Atlantic states. It is separated from rustic northern Vermont only by the blue waters of the lake, and the signs of a New England approach to life are everywhere evident.For example, you cannot take a walk on a country lane without seeing many stone walls, in various stages of repair and disrepair. Some are clean and sharp-edged, some are rambling and covered with flowers, and others are vine-covered, weedy, and completely unattended, only a year or two away from full-scale collapse and a wholesale return to nature.

And who can see a stone wall without thinking of Robert Frost? His wonderful poem of ruminations on stone walls, their inevitable decline and decay, and his annual meeting with his neighbor to replace the stones in their common wall, Mending Wall, begins as follows:

Something there is that doesn’t love a wall,
That sends the frozen-ground-swell under it,
And spills the upper boulders in the sun,
And makes gaps even two can pass abreast

While those weren't the lines I was going to quote, I enjoyed this writer's introduction and thought you would also.