Stone haven

I’ve been building walls of stone. Perhaps it’s the images of the landscapes of summer breezes that guide me.

Northumberland County and the Trent Hills—Hastings and Warkworth—tell a soothing story of counter-lines, figures, naked, sleeping beneath sheets, cotton dyed of vermillion and rust and the spilled bullion of early hay. Outbuildings, stitched to the rises, stitched to the shadows, ride the land like the patches of my grandmother’s now-tattered quilt that rests at the foot of my bed.

Hidden beneath the soil, hard rock shattered by the millstone of a relentless glacier’s hand, time worn and shorn to fine sediment, pulverized quartz and granite. The glacier’s final retreat, surrendered and, in tired defeat, abandoning its threshold of ice, its payload of gatherings found along a long, slow march south where finally, in differed silence, it gave way to the sun and while shrinking north, bequeathing to the newness of the ground, a shoreline: A shoreline to hold watch as sentry of the ages, to stand guard over a rising, ancient freshwater sea.

Travel farther north onto the stiff rise of Canadian Shield, it is a melancholy song, for me anyway. Handsome rock, frost-pitted yet inviting in its stillness, exposed here and there, home to lichen and mosses and tamarack and white cedar. But perhaps it is its withholding to the domestic hand of farming, except in shallow pockets of decayed woods; un-furrowed and beaten scrub-land, tense and unyielding to the forged steel blade of the plough. The people who are there now, descendents, today who live and dream and die among the monuments of rock, in houses and outbuildings as scattered and as sparse as the very land itself. Perhaps it is why I feel that sense of remote, that undisclosed and alone feeling, owned by the ghost-like rock of the shield.

And here on our island, on the flats, a platter-like serving of shale and limestone grip the hills like a forest mushroom, a conk, a tree fungus caught to the trunk of the mainland. I gather stones from a pile of pickings, my unkempt collection, mostly hand-sized pieces from this Sunday’s pile in my yard. I simply toss them, one by one, into the wheelbarrow. And as I do, I work up a song, like the work-songs of before. Now in the rhythm I try to catch with each toss, comes the word ‘stone’ as used in our spoken language: you know, as in stone age; etched in stone; sticks and stones; rolling stones and moss.

So I fill a wheelbarrow, then heave at the ash handles as I press ahead, a stoneboat sailing but a stone’s throw away, where, as I take each stone in hand one more time, I become the glacier, permitting each stone to guide where it wants to be. A shape unfolds like a firewood pile or bagels stacked in a stone oven; a wall pushes from the earth here in the quiet of birdsong and wind through the trees. Stepping stone; birthstone or stone-dead. I leave no stone unturned, been stone broke and sometimes stone deaf. How about cornerstone, heart of stone—but who shall cast the first stone? A zigzag meandering wall slowly advances and rises. The pattern is malleable, not etched in stone, got me thinking that seldom have I run into a stone wall. Around and around the wall takes shape, an enclosure for sanctuary, for refuge perhaps, ‘cuz stone walls do not a prison make—nor iron bars a cage.

The images of the landscape of summer breezes levers me as I revel in the joy of creating something from nothing. I work to a lyric familiar: I call my wall Stone Cold Fox. It’s sung to the tune of two birds and one stone only.