Heavy Lifting
“Using rocks, because soil collapses in on itself when it’s this wet, they’re building a foundation that won’t slide down the hillside. The cliffs above us, likely home to bear and other critters, mark the start of mountain streams that run into the yard, to be dealt with in several ways. If you were always fascinated by water, rocks and dirt, and made your own schedule because it was the only way, if you did this work every day for the better part of a lifetime, then you do know more than I do about trust. In this quiet twilight, still sunny but wan, I keep my doors cocked to let in the free air that roams these hills. I breathe in what thunderstorms did to punch up smells, of loam, of wet field stone, of fragrant, uprooted grasses. The huge backhoe out my window is silent; the bulldozer frozen, unable to find its owner or operator. Everything, then, must sleep. But who am I without them? Like a horse without a bridal, or a “star to every wandering bark”, this is my life, attached, but unattached, grateful but with no one to share my deepest thoughts. I might always have dreamed I’d be this free, swinging up, then down, off the back of my very own truck, assessing my tools and the temper of the day, according to clouds and the building heat. I might have unknowingly made all this from scratch: a master baker, adept with my odd, short shrift of ingredients. Aware that there are no guarantees, but that at least, food should be edible. My life, my cake walk, my performance under god-like mountains is now, a given. Like those who dig, those who toil in order to build, those who have stood chest high in muck to please a job’s requirements, with moves under their belt akin to those of the highest Aikido master. Not mastery of paperwork, not deftness of fancy phrases nor the ability to twist an argument to achieve the upper end, but rather the arts of honest, simple, heavy lifting. Shouldering the weight for others, for those who can’t do with a wheel barrow; combing high pasture for the biggest boulders, dragging them in, like fish in a net. Saving the best for last. The giants, the anchors, the sculptural pieces forged way below human consciousness. It comes to me in sleep, where diggers are always running, though in my door yard the machines are turned off. The urgency to uncover, to get past the deceptions of the surface, this hunger gnaws and turns over and over in my psyche, making dents, and ruts and disturbances, that often, in waking, make no sensible story. Yet we continue to scrape & claw, and pray to make solid if only our own, square footage of safety and understanding. As one man, or woman, perched high on the seat of an enormous earth-moving device, looks down and talks lovingly, in hushed tones, to a smaller man, or woman, held dear. A discussion running between them, and for eternity, to make something stronger than one person could do, alone. Yes, some have big tools, & some have big hearts. And some have both, and more. And that’s what’s coming, even to those who refuse to go on living unless someone tells them to live. Hear this now: that despite the drenching onslaught of incomprehensible mumbo jumbo, all along a few brave excavators have been building you, a monolithic floor.”