The Craft! The Craft!

This is a picture of the wall of my house, built for my grandfather as a summer home in 1925. Our corner of Pennsylvania is a glacial moraine; you can’t stick a shovel in the ground without hitting rocks like these — lots of ’em!

I grew up here, and probably for that reason, it was just a few days ago that I actually saw the stones. You will have to enlarge the picture to see it, but — can you see the variety of colors? There’s ochre-yellow, dull beet red, light blue-grey, creamy beige, white, black. It had never occurred to me before that in addition to the mechanical work of mortaring in the stones, the masons must have given thought to distributing the different hues.

Inside we have three fireplaces. The one in the living room is very large: the two in upstairs bedrooms much smaller. In all three, the stones of the chimneys are exposed on the inside; they dominate and define the rooms.

All stones in all three fireplaces are a fairly uniform elephant-grey color, just enough variation in tone and striation to make them interesting. All three have as a mantel a single straight slab of stone, (and I still can’t figure out how they managed that!) rough-hewn on the edges, smooth as glass on its surface.

Here’s another thing I only noticed during a recent bout of flu while I huddled in front of the fireplace in our bedroom: the stones in the bedroom fireplaces are all smaller than the ones in the living room fireplace. The bedroom fireplaces are like a scale model of the big one.

Now, when you’re inside looking at the fireplaces, you might assume the uniformity of color wasn’t hard to achieve. All stones are grey, aren’t they? But no–see above! The interior stonework, too, involved not only technical skill but aesthetic expertise. Artistry.

These wonders are the old masons’ doing, and they are marvelous in my eyes. Almost a century now since they laid down their trowels — workmen that needed not to be ashamed! — and surrendered their stone creation to my ancestor.

I praise the craft!