In recollection.

I was feeling nostalgic this morning and went hunting for a photo to share when I happened upon this one. I can tell you that it's 1982. I am almost six and my brother was three and a half. It's roughly this very time of year. I can tell you that my Gramp built that stone wall (and many many more like it all over the Chippen's Hill area of Bristol, CT, when he was a young man working for Bristol Nurseries). I have so much nostalgia about those stone walls, with their seemingly haphazard personalities, yet somehow standing the test of time and New England winters. Modern stone wall construction, while more elegant in its neat assembly, does not even come close to the satisfaction I get from admiring a stone wall a century old. I can tell you that my Gram and Gramp owned three acres of property, and I ran and played and explored every inch of it. I haven't been there in more than fifteen years, but I can still close my eyes and navigate it perfectly in my memory. Every last fruit tree and dip in the ground and jagged property line and rock poking through the grass. I can tell you, by the shadows, that it was late morning and the dew on the lawn had dried (but not after we tracked wet footprints through Gram's kitchen…and were promptly ushered back outside). The air was changing from the early morning green dampness to that crisp golden brown of grass drying in the heat of the summer sunshine. It was starting to get that heaviness, pressing down on early August with the arrival of the proverbial "dog days of summer." What I cannot tell you? Is what, on God's green earth, we were doing when my Gramp stealthily froze this moment of my childhood. Kids are weird.

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