What the Drains Take

You wrote about the wall behind the old bakery, the one you raised in your third year on your own, the one you still touch at the coping every market day without meaning to. Half of it comes down before winter for the new drains, and you wrote about it the way a person writes about a hand being cut off.

Nobody is asking you to stop caring about that wall. Caring for a thing you built well is not the trouble here, and I would worry about you if you felt nothing. The trouble is narrower. It is a clench that has crept in under the caring, the sense that if the stone comes down some part of the man who set it comes down with it. Those are two different things wearing the same coat.

The wall you built that year is already a wall in the past. It stood, it did its work, and nothing that happens to the stones this winter can reach back and unbuild what was actually built. Holding the memory in a fist and resenting the drains does not protect the wall. It just makes the losing hurt twice, once for the stone and once for the fist that would not open, and the drains go in either way.

What stays is not the coping course itself. It is that you know how to raise a wall true, and nobody can take that down. It is the stone, most of which can go straight into the new work if you ask for it, still doing its job, only facing a different direction. It is whoever learns to lay a course from watching you, the way you learned it from someone who is gone now and still in your own hands.

Go and watch it come down if you can stand to. Mark which stones are sound before the crew gets to them. Carry the wall the way you carry anything that matters, in an open hand, not a fist closed around a memory. No fist ever built has stopped a drain crew, and yours will not be the first.

— the Mason

This is a teaching-letter. No one sent it, and it is addressed to whoever opens it.