She appeared from the vestibule, glanced at her clipboard, and called, “Joe.”

I followed her silently into a stale little room furnished only with a padded chair. She swung the folding arm down, locking me in for the world’s most boring rollercoaster.

“Which arm?”

I told her and she pushed up the corresponding sleeve.

Her face changed. A smile appeared. Then she laughed out loud.

“I didn’t know if you were rich or worked outside, but there’s my answer.”

I laughed too.

“I guess rich people don’t have farmer’s tans,” I said.

“Neither do nurses,” she replied.

We kept joking until she had all the blood she needed.

As she walked me back to the lobby, she asked if I had to go to work now.

“Yeah. My boss is an a-hole.”

Eliza’s brother and father helped us design and build the panels with cedar and wire mesh. That’s an understatement; we never would have tackled it without them. In one heroic weekend we assembled the panels, dug countless holes, many of them twice after realizing our initial math was wrong, and installed the posts and panels everywhere except along one stretch bordering a neighbor’s property.

That neighbor planned to put up her own fence soon. It made sense to tie into hers later. In the meantime, we threw together a temporary fence out of chicken wire and metal stakes.

That temporary fence lasted the rest of Sasso’s life.

It was still standing when Vim showed up a few years later. He’s a little more curious about what’s happening on the other side of it, and we’re a little more concerned about keeping him safely contained. When Eliza suggested replacing the old janky thing with something more secure, I realized I’d stopped noticing the fence years ago.

Once my attention returned to it, I couldn’t believe how rough it looked. Bent stakes. Sagging wire. Random reinforcements added over the years.

I build fences for a living, only they’re made of stone. Walls meant to last generations.

One of the most important fences in my life was thrown together as an afterthought, meant to last a month or two.

Instead it held together an entire chapter of our lives.

I set the last stone an hour before the boat home left the island. I took down the batter frames and packed up my tools: shovels and rakes, a cutoff saw, a transit in its big clunky case, a dolly, two long lining bars, insulated tarps that never got used, and a large assortment of hammers and chisels. All of it stuffed into the Subaru along with workboots and raingear, dirty clothes, leftover food, coffee-making contraptions, and seltzers. Lots of seltzers.

Scott, the caretaker, waved goodbye while blowing oak leaves.

I got my parking spot at the ferry terminal and wolfed down a sandwich as the boarding process began. A few hours later I was home again, eating Friday-night-pizza with Eliza and Vim. A whole temporary world that had occupied my mind so completely for weeks suddenly disappeared.

And now it’s on to the next one.

What was I supposed to do? Not wave to that friend of a friend of a friend’s uncle I met once at a birthday party when I was seven?

When I go back to Boothbay now, there aren’t many waves. In Brunswick there are none. But I found a place where that tradition exists.

I know one person on North Haven. But for three weeks, everyone I passed on the short drive between the inn and the jobsite waved at me. And I waved right back.

I didn’t realize until then how much I’d missed that.

Two men and a woman step out of the ticket office in safety yellow jackets and hats. They huddle together and look out at us, lined up in our cars and trucks, waiting to get on the ferry to North Haven. The woman points at me in my one-ton and says, “That’s our twenty-six footer.”

After finishing my first job on the island two years ago, I sat up on the open deck for the ride back to the mainland. The Fox Islands faded slowly behind us. The Camden Hills grew larger ahead. These waters are some of the most beautiful in Maine, and I wasn’t going to be one of those guys sitting in his truck staring at his phone the whole time.

Now that the trip has become more routine, I realize I was too quick to judge.

Today I’m one of those guys. Sitting in my truck on a boat on the ocean. The twenty-six footer. Making my morning commute with a load of rocks.

Forbidden sleep is the best.

Then I heard a tap, tap, tap and slowly realized it was coming from my window. A wild-eyed man with red hair was peering in at me.

“Sorry to wake ya. Those are some nice rocks.”

I’ve fallen asleep on planes while idling on the runway before takeoff. Trains and buses have the same effect. Now I can add ferries to the list. It’s about an hour and ten minutes to cross from Rockland to North Haven, and I can’t read or write or even look at my phone without getting nauseous. A nap feels almost inevitable.

I rolled down the window. My new friend said he’d laid a few stones in his day and thought the rocks in the back of my truck would stack up into a nice wall.

I hope he’s right.

You fall for an April Fools gag. They are not, in fact, building a gondola to whisk people up Mt. Battie.

You’re finally done with the wall that took all winter. Time to pick up the leftovers.

You load every last stone onto the truck and realize too late you’ve overdone it. Spring is mud season. You’re halfway up your hubcaps in it.

Two hours later, with the help of the excavator and a tow strap, the truck is free from the mire. The lawn you were cleaning is more than a little worse for the wear.

It was warm enough to handle all those stones without gloves today. The button on your laptop that recognized your fingerprint doesn’t recognize you any more.

“No,” I said, showing a little more annoyance than I intended. “It’s up to me.”

They mocked me for sounding high and mighty, as good friends should. But they know me well enough to know I didn’t mean it like that. They’re right. It would be easier to ask the client whether we should exaggerate the serpentine curve of the path or move people more directly through the garden.

But that’s my call. That’s why they hired me.

It might work. It might not.

It’s a privilege to be on the hook like that.

There’s nothing inherently wrong with those rocks lying there. They simply weren’t chosen.

I almost feel guilty leaving them out of the wall. With all the selecting and rejecting, the rejoicing when they fit and cursing when they don’t, you start to know them individually. If I pile these leftovers up and use them in a wall ten years from now, I’ll remember some of them. Oh yeah, I almost used that one in Manchester, on that tricky part on the north side, about halfway up the wall.

I’m not going to go home and weep for the leftovers. We all want to be chosen. They got left behind.

We started with a fairly small stone but at the last minute I decided to trim eighteen inches off the bottom. I was afraid it would overwhelm the wall beside it. As we fixed the straps to set it in place, some doubt crept in. Had we gone too far? But as we lowered it onto the steel pin drilled into the ledge and the stone locked in place with a thud, it looked just right.

When a site calls for scale, there’s something satisfying about moving and setting large stones. It’s intoxicating, which makes it easy to believe bigger is always better. Not every piece needs to announce itself. This stone isn’t the star of the show. It guides visitors into the space without competing for attention.

It’s just enough.

And then my phone rang.

“Potential Spam.”

A small interruption, the price of keeping my phone on me when I work alone. Instead of slipping the phone directly back into my pocket, I made the mistake of checking my texts and emails. I responded to two, neither of which were urgent, then got back to work. But something had changed.

The first stone I grabbed didn’t fit. Neither did the second. They were no longer marching themselves into the wall. Instead of picking them up on instinct, I was analyzing every stone in the pile, searching for the perfect fit. I’d tightened up. The work went on, but the spell was broken.

There’s nothing special about them. Just four average stones, set together well. They’ll go unnoticed when the wall is complete. While a finished wall is seen as a whole and not its individual pieces, it doesn’t usually feel that way while you’re building it. By the time you find a stone, move it into place with your body, and assess how it lives with its current and potential neighbors, it can feel like the most important rock in the world. It’s easy to get so hyperfocused you’re unable to see the wall for the stones.

But right now, these four stones feel important. At least to me.

I’m driving home with that satisfying kind of tired that comes from forward progress. After weeks of delays, the wall is moving again. So am I.

I started the prep work before the first frost. I’ve had months to think about the composition of antique granite slabs and round, weathered fieldstone. I’ve been itching to start building. And, if I’m honest, itching to make it feel like mine. I wanted to put part of myself into that wall. What would that be like with someone else working on it?

I pushed those feelings aside as we worked together for the first time on my wall. Unsurprisingly, Dave did beautiful work. My grasping for control eased up a little.

The next day, just before lunch, I picked up a rock and felt that unpleasantly familiar pop in my lower back. I knew right away what it meant. My day was done. Probably the rest of the week, too.

What happens to the wall now?

That night Dave sent photos of the section he’d taken over. It wasn’t exactly how I’d been picturing it, it was even better.

That’s all it took to break the spell.

My wall became ours.

I felt a little ball of anxiety in my stomach. This would mean taking apart some of the work we’d already struggled to do in the cold and snow. This would mean thawing frozen ground and redigging footings by hand to avoid a sewer line. This would mean sourcing and transporting more material, and moving it all up an icy hill. I tried to ignore all that and listen to his idea. I tried to picture the change in my head, and visualize how it would interact with the work we’d already done and the work still to come.

It was a good idea. It was the right call.

This interaction could have gone wrong in so many ways. I could have responded with a “how dare he question me” attitude. Afraid to offend “the artist,” he might have stayed silent and regretted it every time he walked past the wall for the next twenty years. I could have dismissed his suggestion out of pride or resisted it out of laziness. I could have agreed to the change but resented it because it wasn’t my idea. I could have hated the idea but gone along with it anyway, afraid to stand my ground, letting my vision for the project get diluted. He could have micromanaged the implementation, eroding the trust between us.

But instead, we moved forward with the idea that best served the project.

Two things from that trip still stand out clearly in my memory. The first: the audible gasps of awe I made walking alone amongst the redwoods.

The second: some sage advice from a master stonemason during the one day I managed to keep my butt planted at the conference I’d paid for and flew all the way across the country to attend.

Richard Rhodes has done some impressive things with stone. Among them, he apprenticed with an ancient stonemasons’ guild in Italy, salvaged a stone village in China before it was flooded for dam construction, and ran multiple successful stone businesses. It was a real privilege to listen to him talk about the craft. I think about his advice on pricing every time I’m about to hit send on an estimate.

That advice sounds simple. Don’t assume you know other people’s financial situation. Or, said another way, don’t let your relationship with money dictate the price of the job.

This is easier said than done. When you’re putting an estimate together, the numbers can get big pretty quickly. It’s easy to think, Wow, this is a lot of money. Is that too much? Maybe I should shave it down a little. Our hangups about money can lead us to doubt the value of our work. But, what feels like a lot of money to you may be exactly how much your client wants to invest in quality stonework. There’s no way to know until you hit send. The best thing to do, according to Richard that day, is to charge what the work actually costs and not what you think is too high or too low.

When I write it out here it doesn’t sound like earth shattering wisdom. But its timing and its source really hit home for me. It made the conference, even one day of it, worthwhile. The redwoods were ok, too.

Read more about the 3Ps (of which Pricing is one) here.

I’m carrying some guilt alongside my appetite as I look for a parking spot. How is it 9:30 already? How am I not at work yet? How did I convince myself to stop for breakfast? That guilt is amplified as I pass some electricians trying to wire new exterior lights on this bitter morning. They’re working. Shouldn’t I be?

I planned on getting breakfast to go, but when I see the scale of the “sandwich” through the clear takeout box, it’s obvious I’d better sit down. This is knife-and-fork food, not something you eat one-handed while steering. Definitely not with a newly acquired pit bull riding shotgun.

I sit at the counter in front of a large mirror and watch myself eat. Maybe it’s better Eliza and I sit side by side for dinner each night, sparing her this view. Beyond my reflection, I can see the electricians outside, their faces red from the cold.

I recognize one of them. It’s Lucas. Not someone I know well, but well enough to intensify the guilt I feel about sitting inside eating a hearty meal this late in the morning.

I stayed up the night before and watched the Patriots play and win their first playoff game in years. I don’t feel guilty about that. This morning I sat on the couch for an extra cup of coffee with Vim, that hungry mutt now waiting in the car. I don’t feel guilty about that. It snowed last night. One of my winter duties is shoveling out Brenda, our neighbor across the street. I don’t feel guilty about that.

I ate faster than normal. The fried chicken was surprisingly good at that hour. And I felt strange knowing Lucas was, unbeknownst to him, a witness to a less-than-best version of myself.

With one last dip of the biscuit in the gravy, it was time to go to work.

Last night’s dusting of snow hid the ice that had turned the steep driveway into a luge track. Somehow, Eliza pulled the car out of a slide toward a drainage ditch and got us back up the hill in reverse. We parked on the side of the road and walked in, trying to find the crunchy snow along the edges.

We navigated around the first wall and its surrounding satellites of rock piles, all covered with tarps to keep out the snow and ice. As we walked across the yard towards the next wall the flower farm came into view, hibernating beneath eighteen inches of snow.

“It’s so cold here,” she said.

“You get used to it.”

We uncovered part of the next wall so she could see some of what I’ve been building. I didn’t have gloves on and my hands turned red removing the anchor rocks from the tarps.

“The rocks are bigger than they look in the photos,” she said. “This is a big project.”

I don’t need her to think I’m tough or to be impressed by the scale of the project. But having her walk through the snow, shiver in the cold, feel the size of the stones and see what I have to do with them, turned into a nice little moment of connection. How often do the people closest to us actually experience what our days are like?

We made it back to the car without slipping on the ice and turned on the heated seats. We drove home and made pancakes.

Its shape allows its mass to run lengthwise into the structure. Textbook for building a strong wall. It’s just at the limit of what I can pick up safely and carry across the compacted snow and scattered stone chips without slipping or twisting something. I know this because I’ve tried to use this stone about a dozen times.

To borrow a phrase from Kevin Gardner in The Granite Kiss, this rock is a Cheap Seducer. A stone that seems perfect but never quite works. Never quite fits. Still, you keep coming back to it again and again, thinking this time it will be different.

It never is.

In the same book, Gardner offers more sage advice: look for a rock for the spot, not a spot for the rock.

Maybe there will be a spot in the wall that needs that stone. Maybe there won’t. Maybe it will end up buried deep in the back of the wall, never to be seen. Is that such a poor fate?