Stoned again!

Some shots of the "New" bathroom before (lower) and during (above) renovation...some later shots this trip to show the finished product!

April 12th 2009

I spent most of Easter Sunday on my knees, which in at least one sense would make my mom happy, however rather than venerating the almighty, an act of faith in the unknown, I placed my faith in 400 year-old tiles coupled with modern adhesion technology. Yes I spent Sunday preparing to tile the “new” bathroom, tiling the “new” bathroom, and admiring my tiling of the “new” bathroom. I say new because I began to muse on old and new when I found one old tile with the paw prints of a dog set clearly on it (I did us it in the floor).

I got me to thinking about how old the tile was, which I knew to be in the range of three to four hundred years old. Do you know what that is in dog years? Two to three millennia! Anyway, that lead me to thinking about the bathroom which is in the farmhouse which again is bout 650 years old…650 years old! It was here before my ancestors left France for Canada, before there was even a thought of a “New” world, indeed even before Columbus drifted off course and bumped into the Americas.

I know I’m not alone in my sense of wonder at the age of things but there are times when even I am drawn up short thinking of the spans of human time that are represented in the farmhouse. It goes back further I know…there used to be a Roman settlement very close by and its certainly safe to assume villas and buildings throughout the area. By all reckoning the peak population of free and slave of this area in Roman times probably approached about 30-40 percent of modern levels, that would mean about 1200 souls in this little valley, most clustered around this hill called Monte Lauro. They would have built fine sturdy houses in stone, their quarrying marks like signatures on masterpieces.

You can scan a wall today, knowing that the stones are probably in their third or fourth use, and pick out the ones most likely quarried by the Romans. They are everywhere. To me it is a comfort, that even in their jumbled reutilization, that they remain as they were originally made, by hands long set in rest and by minds that saw the world in way so different than we can now see.

Even further back, one wall of the farm has in it a very peculiar stone, a stone unlike any other in the wall. My eyes were drawn to it like a magnet when I first saw it in full light. I can imagine the masons, hundreds of years ago working on that wall, laughing under the hot Mediterranean sun, toiling on makeshift scaffolding and coming upon this stone. I can see them hefting it with one hand, tossing it, as masons do, to see its best fit in the puzzle of the whole wall. I can imagine their surprise when the stone stared back at them, through eyes long turned to stone themselves. They then set it in the wall looking over the stable, as if like some guardian set to watch over the flock for as long as the wall stood. They would not have known then anything about fossils or about human history. They would have believed themselves descended from Adam and Eve, cast out of the garden into a long and toilsome stint in purgatory. They would not have thought these eyes the eyes of man but of some beast. But perhaps what they cradled in their hands was their own kin, some million years old and turned to stone with the passage of time. It closely resembles skulls of homo erectus. And perhaps it watched another dawn in its own day in this very same part of the world. Who knows…but it begs thinking, and pondering and wondering.

That is another reason why I like it here. It seems that the mind is unshackled from the rut of everyday existence and is free to travel the pathways of conjecture and to arrive at some very different places than one might otherwise venture to.

I don’t think I’ll ever think of stones the same way again but unlike that old dog who walked across some tiles freshly made I have the hope that my marks will be seen in a few hundred years by someone who thinks about what came before them.