1. When I first moved here, approximately 18 years and 11 months and 22 days ago, the backyard was a dirt patch surrounded by a chainlink fence. There were dead bodies* and rats everywhere, symbolically foreshadowing our current political landscape. (*cats)
2. I spent a lot of time wondering what I was going to do with it. Though I had spent a portion of my twenties working as a professional plant waterer, my knowledge of plants was limited to the indoor, office variety. I knew nothing about gardening.
3. One day that spring, I spotted a dumpster full of old bricks. I took a closer look and fell in love a thousand times. Each one was a work of art, made of beautiful red clay and imprinted with the trademark of the manufacturer. I had to rescue them. I spent several days hauling them back to the house, through the basement, and out to the backyard. The bricks seemed to like being stacked up and arranged; even without mortar, they held together pretty well. They were doing the job they were created to do.
4. In the meantime, I had read a few gardening books and knew that, with these old bricks, I had some excellent ‘pavers’ on my hands. I’m not what you would ever describe as ‘handy’ but I managed to buy a few long pieces of wood (aka ‘one by [some bigger number]’) that I used to frame a path. I pretended to use a level and maybe some string, but mostly I did it by feel. It was like making a lasagna: the bricks went on top of several layers of materials known as Step One and Step Two, which came in bags with no instructions because there was no question about which one went first (and which went second). Despite fumbling through the dark, I managed to make something serviceable.
5. A few years passed and it occurred to me and Stephen that the design of the garden could be improved, which required disassembling the brick path and reconstructing it several times. It was a lot of work, and though it was never perfect, each iteration was a little better. I also found more bricks at vacant lots in Harlem. Working with the same bricks over and over, I began to recognize them. Oh, I remember you, I would think as I pulled up a brick named Rose or JJJ or Gold. It was like when I was a kid, having mental conversations with my Hot Wheels and Matchbox cars. (Or my stuffed animals, or the pencils in my pencil collection.)
6. We also started adopting some of the cats — Dante was first — and, gradually, the rats disappeared. (I’m not saying there was causation; except for supervised time in the garden, our cats live inside.) Like the bricks, the cats wanted a home.
7. Eventually, as we grew increasingly reclusive, we hired someone to enclose the garden in high walls, at which point I disassembled and rebuilt the brick path for the final time. This design, which curved from one end of the garden to the other, seemed ideal. I couldn’t have done it at the beginning of my bricklaying career, when I was too constrained by right angles and hard edges; I didn’t yet realize the magic of blending something rectangular into a curving form, or if I did, I didn’t have the experience to pull it off. The execution wasn’t flawless — I was still mostly pretending to use a level — but it was very satisfying to walk from one end to the other. The cracks and moss that soon developed helped to make the garden look much older than it really was, which is the effect we wanted. It was relaxing in the way an old cemetery is relaxing: each brick, like a tombstone, has a story to tell if you can decipher its language.
8. But gradually, because these bricks are very old and had to endure global-warming era winters (perversely cold), some of the them splintered apart (RIP) and needed to be replaced. Even though I had built the path, I found myself oddly reluctant to undertake the repairs. We had plenty of good bricks, but I had lost the will to arrange them. (Having published two novels during this time period, I now possessed the temperament of ‘a writer,’ meaning that I was afflicted with crippling self-doubt.) When I looked at the path, I couldn’t imagine having built it, even though I knew I had. Or was pretty sure I had. Except I was no longer that person, so it might as well have been someone else. I procrastinated for a few years until the path became perilous, even for the cats. Then, a month ago, I finally summoned the will to begin. I started small, replacing a few broken bricks. It felt good to hold the bricks and the shovel. I found an old bag of Step Two in the basement. I couldn’t imagine what I had been afraid of. This led to a somewhat bigger project and then another in which I repaired a big section of the patio. It still wasn’t perfect; it didn’t look as nice as the patio of the modern castle in Portugal I saw featured on the BBC show ‘The World’s Most Extraordinary Brick Paths,’ but it was still a big improvement.
9. As I swept piles of Step Two (aka ‘sand’) into the crevices, I felt like I had learned something important.
10. But with the path speaking for itself, it wasn’t for me to say what.
;
