Stones for my path
My mother, who is now 95 years old, lived in a renovated historic schoolhouse which was just sold. Before the sale I went over and hauled out car loads of lichen covered stones from the walls on her property. With them I built a cobble path to my backyard.
These stones not only remind me of my mother, but remind me too of the landscape around this county that was mostly a farming area. Stones heave in the winter into cleared fields and farmers would gather them and make walls to define property and keep their animals contained. You can see stone walls in forests where the new growth has grown up over fields no longer used.
I”ve started to grow creeping thyme in between the stones, and over the years they will spread and flourish.
One of the aspects of tea study is the appreciation for things that are now gone, a nostalgia, “a remembrance of things past”.