dry, on the rocks.

Every stone must be

Collected. Organized. Lifted. Memorized. Stacked. Stood upon. Pressed upon. Scrutinized. Dropped. Picked up. Placed. No. Dropped. Picked up. Placed. No. Dropped. Lifted. Maneuvered. Ball-bustingly heaved. Placed. Not quite. Shaped. Chiseled. Smashed. Massaged. Spoken to. One more time. YES!

Such is the way of the (modified) dry-stack stone foundation. I say modified, because we are using a sand/clay mortar. We aren't slopping it on like cake decorators, though, we're just using it to fill in gaps in the wall through which drafts or mice could potentially enter the house. It's still a rock-on-rock situation.

My help is here. His name is Mike. He's a white skinny guy with glasses and curls, much like myself, but carrot-topped. He's the last real American man. We work well, slow, and quiet. Here he is channeling energy into a stone. He'll wiggle it, tickle it, then walk on it, until it calls him daddy.


The big, rippled rock is the "threshold" (on top of which the door will go). There's no getting in or out of the house without her permission. She's probably 400 pounds, and she's not afraid to look you in the eye and ask for the magic word. If you look close, you can see the sand/clay mortar between the rocks in the middle of the photo.


When Mike had first arrived, we began laying the stone foundation on the actual site. After day 1, a rainy and demoralizing day, we realized we didn't know squat about stone-stacking. So we took down what we had done and began playing around with rocks elsewhere, making test walls, and monuments, and getting a feel for what is solid and pretty.

We have two types of stones: Virginia stones, and local stones. The Virginia stones were shipped in years ago from a historic Virginian house site, and have been used extensively around the farm. There was a small pile left, and I got the go-ahead to use it on my cottage. They are beautiful stones: flat, nice edges, gorgeous colored faces, and bow ties. Our local stones are much different. They are jagged, pointy, randomly complexified, and might take your life from you if you fell on one at the wrong angle. We've been told they might be a type of flint, and probably what the Native Americans in this region used to fashion arrowheads. They're difficult to stack. Here is a test wall made by Mike, using Virginia stones.


Here I am, shaping one of the local stones. It keeps saying "no," and I just keep telling it "yes."

This was a monumental moment: the completion of the first course! It took days, because we used the biggest, heaviest, and most strangely-shaped rocks (the reasons being that this course will not be seen, heavy rocks are good to have on the bottom to spread the load of the walls, and we want our work to get easier and easier).


I was thrilled to again have Jess visit me. We had talked about her coming early last week, but never set a day or time. I was surprised by a Wednesday morning text message along the lines of "I'm in PA, driving south, ETA 7:00 PM." Jess did everything we did: rock-shaping, mortar testing, mortar laying, muscle-flexing, and stone-stacking.


Jess also got a little burnt, because she didn't want to rub clay all over herself.


On Saturday, Jess and I took our weary bodies into town and spent all her money, and none of mine. We bought a white sweet potato and a regular sweet potato at the farmer's market, did a lot of biking, checked out the "really really free market," stopped in a pottery store, and a bookstore, and a thrift store (new shirt), found a playground cove in which to do Yoga, ate our traditional Weaver Street Market meal of bread/hummus and an ice cream pint in the sunny grass, and watched squirrels in the highest and most delicate limbs of the UNC campus trees. Back at the farm, we chopped wood and built a Rumford fireplace, in which we had a blazing fire spitting flames around two tin-foil packages full of sweet potato, onion chunks, and chives (that we harvested earlier in the day from under Jess' butt in a yard).

The god brick sits atop the Rumford, encouraging the army of bricks beneath it to send directional heat out towards the camera, and smoke up towards the moon.


Thanks, Jess. And it's really great to have Mike. I'll be heading back to the site tomorrow, with the intention of putting up another couple courses of stone this week.