It also left us with a large mound of unwanted one inch p stone….“ Now what?” And in answer to my thoughts Mag said…..
“ Just shovel some of them into the garbage can every week until they’re gone .” and so that’s what I did today and it reminded me of my childhood. The back half of my childhood back yard was a steep incline of perpetual erosion and descending stones which my Mother endlessly shoveled into the garbage cans. This mining operation lasted seven years with never a halt except when the snows came and with never a complaint from our garbage men. They were tough guys back then…and they had to be. The neighbors used to peer out the windows just to watch the two guys wait for the driver to get out and help lift the two hundred and twenty five pound barrels in front of the Berthiaumes every Tuesday. You could hear em grunt even through the closed windows.
Dad, being a frequent flier, was frequently gone and that left the manly duties of taking out the trash up to me. With all the strength possessed I used to take each barrel to the street with a series of lift and pulls…thump… thump… thump …traveling the fifteen foot driveway three inches at a time, and again with the neighbors eyes glued to the crack in the curtains. As I got older and stronger Mom just used this to add more stones to the barrels and so it never got easier. I remember the terrified eyes of my two younger brothers on the day barely past my seventeenth birthday when I left to join the navy. They knew they had just inherited that chore and their fear was well founded.
Things are wussified now….my garbage can is on wheels so no prob getting the stone filled beast to the street . And the garbage man remains seated in the cab to operate the mechanical arm that reaches down to pick up the can sans effort. I guess some things improve even when they stay the same
