by Roger


Rebuilding the Rock Gardens




I wish I had a picture of Dad building our rock gardens -- his labor of love. Couldn't be anything in our yard more beloved.

So sacred have I always considered the rock gardens, that I never could bear any alteration to Dad's original work. But some things can't be controlled. It was in either '80 or '81 that I went outside on a summer morning and discovered considerable vandalism to the front rock gardens alongside the driveway on the street side of our front walk. That is the long low portion of the rock wall. There lied Dad's precious rocks strewn about the driveway, with ragged holes in the earth where they'd been torn out.

I wanted to murder whatever neighborhood kid had done it. All I could do was to rebuild, though it was not possible to make it the same as it had been.

A month or two later, while I was in the deepest of sleeps in the middle of the night in the basement room with its window facing the rock garden, I heard thunderous crashes. Rocks were crashing down in massive quantities. It went on and on and on, and I could only lie and listen as I found it impossible to rouse myself from the deepest of slumber. Easily two full minutes went by with no let up of the crashing rocks. Finally, with a tremendous effort, I jerked myself fully awake.

I went bolting out the basement door and sprinted into the front yard, ready to beat and/or apprehend the scum perpetrators. And there.. in our front yard.. were a bunch of teenage girls.. toilet papering our yard. A few of them were racing about wildly on the rock gardens hurling the paper rolls over the top of the large shrub next to our front door -- thus, the carnage to Mom's and Dad's beloved rock garden.

How shocked to see this. I was about 26 or 27 and of course knew no high school girls. Wrong house? Apparently. And how awkward is it to direct ones pre-existing fury at a bunch of girls engaged in this, as utterly moronic and indifferent as they were to the carnage they were causing. My split second reaction in that hideously awkward and massively frustrating moment was to pretend to take note of their license plate and then turn and dash back into the house without saying a word.

Never knew what to make of it.

I spent most of the following day rebuilding all three levels of the rock gardens. It was more than two years before it began to look natural again. It takes that long for plant growth to fill in between the rocks.

The one tiny silver lining was that I got to experience for myself the artistic labor Dad had engaged in decades earlier. A bit of bonding I suppose.




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