Going Places
I’ve spend one-quarter of my life building paths. The rest of the time
I’ve spent exaggerating. But when you think of it, it hasn’t been a waste of
time, because what else is there to life other than trying to get from one
place to another? Now that Richard and I live on seven acres, my personal
path-building opportunities seem endless. Never content with a homogenous
home/garden/anything, the trails winding through our property are a study in
the variety of materials you can lay down and call a walkway.
Last week, we actually bought rock for a trail. If you saw our property, the
irony of this purchase would hit you like a two-ton boulder; we live on a rock
pile. But because this particular path runs from the laundry room to the
bedroom and I walk it with arm loads of clothes more times a day than I, a
liberated woman of the Nineties, care to admit, it had to be smooth. Like cut
stone. Not the beautiful holy rock that lies about our land by the truck load
that I had been stumbling across. The new flat path was a cinch to lay (just
set the stones in a bed of sand, fitting them together like puzzle pieces) and
is a joy to walk, but, boy, does it look out of place. Hopefully, time will
give these blazing white stones a patina rustic enough to fit in with
everything else.
But the task of the path must determine the material. For casual strolling, we
like paths of decomposed granite. Little cedar logs, of which we have almost as
many as porous stones, laid side to side make a natural trail that keeps us out
of the mud, but is torture on bare feet. At our former house, the long,
well-used path from our driveway to the front door was a boardwalk made of
planks that washed up on the lake shore. I always liked that path because the
sound of the dogs running along it as they ran out to greet us when we came
home was like the welcome home drumming of our tribe. We’ve made soft trails of
cedar mulch and winding paths of brick and commercial paves. With the help of a
front-end loader, we’ve laid giant boulders for stepping stones. We’ve scythed
paths through tall grass. We have been trail blazers. But in every case, our
paths have been wide and crooked, because there’s nothing more boring than
walking the straight and narrow.
Get your mail to me via whatever path you can. Write me at The Austin
Chronicle, PO Box 49066, Austin, TX 78765 or e-mail me at
Suzebe@aol.com.
This article appears in July 21 • 1995 and July 21 • 1995 (Cover).