Stone Walls

The spring before my father died, Josh and I took him back to his family farm site in Worcester for Father’s Day. Nothing left of the house and barns but the cellar holes. My dad was in his mid-eighties and the weather was as well. We could only drive so close to the farm and then had to walk, slowly and carefully across the field. My dad and I had come here many times when I was a child but he had not done so for many years: and although no one uttered the words, we knew this would be last time.

When we reached the stone foundation where the house stood, my father leaned on his cane and became quiet: a man reflecting on his past. He pointed out the three pine trees that his brother, Ira Jr. had planted as a young man. They stood straight and tall like ghosts guarding the faded farm. We came upon a large rectangular stone, now leading nowhere but at one time served as the bottom step of the farmhouse. The step four children bounded down, where a tired Ira entered the house after working a long day for the phone company, where the snowplow driver picked up my grandmother in a blizzard and brought her to the hospital to deliver my father. Near the step were some pink wild roses, “outhouse roses” as they were known. My grandmother fostered and fussed over those flowers, my father said with a far away smile. I picked one and tucked it into my braid.

We made our way further past the house toward the barn. My dad talked about once finding a penny near the barn cellar hole on a hike he made up to the old farm. My grandmother was alive and he brought the penny to show her. She looked hard at it for a moment and then handed it back to him. “Couldn’t have been ours,” She turned her head away. “We never had a penny.”

At the barn cellar hole huge round stones still hold back earth, once making room for cattle and hay but now for poplars with their shiny, spinning leaves. Each day my grandfather would leave the farm in the early morning and walk down over the hill to catch a ride to the phone company. My aunts and uncles walking several miles to the one room school house, baked potatoes in their mittens to keep their hands warm. Each evening my grandfather would return up the mountain, drop his lunch pail on the counter and head into the barn to milk. Work upon work. His children, except later for my father, never going to school past sixth grade so that they too could work that land.

As we entered the large field we had to make our way over the craggy rock wall that bordered the pasture. My father spoke about his father and brother picking up every single stone from the field for those stone walls. Under the hot summer sun they would hoist every size stone into a wagon and, at some point, begin to construct the walls. I shielded my eyes from the afternoon sun and gazed down the length of the field. Long rows of stacked stones, carefully turned corners and then another long stretch to the far end. What struck me was how perfectly these walls were allowing me to see back in time. If I squinted I could see my uncle, a lanky teenager, not the over-weight, tired, bespectacled war vet that I knew: in overalls bending over to lift another round stone into the wagon being pulled by their old horse. Both of them tired of the job. There were bushes and some full grown trees leaning out of these walls now but they still stood true and I felt grateful tears come to my eyes.

One of the many things I took away from that trip was an appreciation for the stone walls that we see in our daily lives. In Vermont there are more miles of stone walls than roads. When I fly in from having traveled, one of the first things I notice from the air about being back home is the land divided into various geometric shapes by stones. These walls probably have nothing to do with legally dividing property anymore, but there they are and there they will stay.

As I walk down the dirt road from our house to the sheep fields I pass through one of the walls that run through our land and beyond. Sometimes I sit on this wall and think about the many sheep these stones have pastured, especially during the Merino craze. I let my gaze travel as far as I can see into the surrounding woods and know that the walls just keep going; moss covered, stones askew, but strong and true.

Josh and I were correct, my father never did return to his family farm after we took him. And now there is something very comforting to me about those lengths of stone walls because, while my father and his father could not go on, his father’s stone walls will, they will continue to hold true their boundaries, keeping, through rain, snow, life and death, what is inside safe and what is outside out.

There they are and there they will stay.