Moving Rocks

The weather has been unremittingly cool and damp for at least a week and a half, perhaps longer. Today while I was working outside moving rocks and cutting brush, the sun actually broke through the fog and cloud, or almost broke through, enough to cast the semblance of a shadow, enough to make you look up to see what it was. It was only for a minute or so, but it reminded me of an old Nova Scotia weather joke: What day is it when the sun shines after two days of rain? Monday, of course! And it reminded me of my old friend Andrew Smith, with whom Albro Hawkins and I travelled to summer school about thirty years ago, when we had another stretch of weather like this and the sun finally came out. Andrew nudged me then and said, in that lovely lilting Cape Breton accent of his, What is that strange light in the sky?

Yesterday it rained hard, so today when it didn’t I decided to get a few things done outside, a few of the innumerable tasks that lie in front of us. Our contractors have torn off the old deck and are framing the new one, which will extend over an area of flagstones, so it seemed like a good time to move the rocks out of their way because we will use them for our new walkway and a patio area. The biggest of them was the one that formed a step up onto the old deck, a real beauty of a rock, and I knew I couldn’t move it easily. Lorraine reminded me that our friend and neighbour Stephen has a good long pry bar (she called it a come along) that he uses for moving rocks when he is repairing or constructing his walls and rocked garden areas. Stephen not only loaned me the pry bar and some steel pipe rollers to move really big rocks, but also offered the use of his dolly which he said that Red, who lives between our houses and also has a dolly, told him was very useful in moving rocks for his rock work.

It was really gratifying to get the pry under the rock step, which was much thicker than I expected, and to budge it even a little. It was set in sand which made it hard to get a purchase on anything to be able to move it out of there, but I was able to lift it enough to get one of the pipe rollers under it and to persuade Andrew, who is young and strong and working on our house, to push on it as I arranged rollers and pried and lifted. It was great to move it to where I wanted it, right next to the large hosta (see above), and to dig out other rocks, disturbing various colonies of ants that rushed around collecting their eggs from their tunnels in the sand, and pile them there as well.

Late in the day the sun really did come out, and for the first time in almost two weeks we felt light and bright and not quite so closed in; in fact, it seemed, at least for a time, that things could dry out a little. Of course night began to fall and the wall of fog that was sitting on the horizon slid right back in to restore the balance of dampness that characterizes our weather here in June. Tomorrow is July 1, Canada Day, and maybe the sun will shine then. Until it does, our large flat rocks will lie there next to the lush hosta, wet and heavy, waiting for us to get to the task of building a walkway, a step, and a patio.