The big men in trucks put in our frost-free water line and rearranged our back yard and built a beautiful stone path to the evolving garden out of chunks of slate buried in the back yard. It was my friend Jack Macmillan’s idea, and it speaks of the steps in life, one at a time.

When we bought the house, we hired a young man, Ajay, to dig out the slate path we found buried under the grass and dirt. It was a mistake, we didn’t have the right equipment, and it was a mess, the slate had collapsed and were in a jumped pile in the ground and all over the place, the steps were too low. In the winter, water pooled and formed a frozen pond – ice for weeks, and then mud. We were going to dig the whole mess out and throw the slate away, Jack said to wait, he had a plan. When the tractor came to dig the frost-free, he had an idea for the slate steps.

So when Vince finished digging a ditch for the line, they brought in a truckload of crushed stone to raise the bed, then dug out all of the slate rocks and steps and re-organized them, painstakingly figuring out – all by eye – where they might have originally gone. All of this slate was buried in the back yard, Maria and I had no idea it was all there, we just saw a half dozen pieces.

I wasn’t even home when Jack and Vince rebuilt this path, we are just astonished and delighted with it. Apart from it’s beauty and historical value, it has great symbolism for me. I love paths and steps, they are the walkways of life to me, connective tissue of homes and lives. Jack never really told me what he had in mind, and I didn’t ask. He’s the kind of person you just trust.

I am grateful to Jack, a neighbor and a friend, and to Vince, for seeing what I could not see and bringing to life something Maria and I would love but could not really imagine or envision, or bring to life. Creativity, for sure, in it’s purest form.

A few men came in a tractor and truck, and our farm is different. Steps to life, one at a time.