It is difficult to imagine for some reason what it would take for the majority of us to engage in manual labor during our waking hours. We, of course, have become accustomed to a more leisurely gate, using our minds and our pocketbooks to direct the muscle and machinery needed to move time and space in the direction of our desire, and our good fortune.
There was a time though, alive in the memory of a few still breathing, when work only got done sometime after we began. Looking back just one lifetime further he stood in the fields that leave testimony to these truths. Stone walls of time and labor.
They go on and on, mile after mile, throughout New England. It took him many days driving by to get his mind around these walls, to understand their purpose, and how they were constructed. Were they for defense? Or perhaps to delineate property? But he was busy traversing the landscape doing the work that brought him here until one afternoon he just stopped, walked into one field and sat down. There he sat for a couple hours allowing the past to creep in.
When the colonists first appeared on these lands they must have been overjoyed with the quality of the soil for planting and harvesting. However soon after they began to till they realized that just below the surface was rock, in all sorts of sizes. Their only choice was to break up the rock and cart it, carry it, of drag it, to the edge of the field. He lifted one of the rocks for a better understanding of the magnitude of this task times many and he just gasped at the notion. Every rock, for as far as he could see, one rock at a time……..one rock at a time.
Please feel free to e-mail a comment to chasingthecenterline@gmail.com
