This Time Will Be Different

Every time I go to the pile, searching for the next stone to add to the wall, one in particular catches my eye. All the stones here have a rich patina of lichen and weathering, but this one feels especially enchanting. It’s round but also somehow flat, appearing so tantalizingly easy to lay I expect it just to set itself in the wall.

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?