Breaking Up is Hard to Do

With spring emerging all around me I keep dreaming of my old house. That tiny garden was hard won, but in the end brought me oh so many lettuces, strawberries, lilies, saffron, daffodils, the droning of bees slowly cruising heavy with pollen, the dart and call of fireflies amongst the flowering vines. So finally, with a warm weekend day, I am in the back of the new house, in my concrete un-garden, taking stock.

Taking stock with my sledge hammer, that is. I begin dismantling the low wall. It feels good to heft the sledge, let gravity pull it downward, gaining velocity until it hits the wall with a solid thump and chips of brick flying, a fissure starts, a brick moves. Sometimes a single brick comes loose, sometimes a chunk of eight or more, which I set on the ground and beat into more manageable hunks.

I continue until I have enough rubble to fill the 10 contractor’s bags I bought earlier. That’s all the work I will do today, just one small step. Sack it up, 10 bags at 50-60 pounds each, and that’s a quarter-ton of smashed brick and concrete to haul up the ladder, through the house, down the front steps, to the curb. I will have to do this twice more to get that wall down. Another 8 or ten times to remove the remaining walls. Countless numbers of times to remove the 2 inch concrete pad that covers the entire back.

There will be no garden this year, but, I hope, a gradually emerging idea of what can be, as I break it apart piece by piece.