Fieldstone

A recent visitor from the UK asked if this part of the country was “the prairie” and if there were any very large farms around. She had heard of these corn and wheat farms that stretched from horizon to horizon and I said, “No, you have to go to Illinois, Iowa, or South Dakota to see that. Mostly what we have are small dairy farms. I think it’s because the ground is full of rocks.”

Any former farm kid around here will tell you about picking rocks. It was an annual spring activity, and I’ve recently been working on a poem about it (link below). Small stones surface in my garden all the time, but so far nothing major. One of the things I love about this place is the extensive presence and use of fieldstone.

Early in my position with the monastery, interviewing one of the Sisters for her Golden Jubilee (50 years of professed religious life), she told me that, though she was a “city” kid from St. Cloud, she had family in St. Joseph and her grandfather had brought over stones from his field for building the church.

This is a story I’ve heard again and again, and I love to think of the farmers driving to town and dumping their loads of fieldstone to build the church. We owe the glory of our fieldstone church (one of several in the area) to those farmers, and the stone cutters and masons who fitted them into a beautiful church building that has stood for more than 150 years.

Mostly these days children don’t walk behind tractors piling stones onto trailer beds. But a lot of farms have giant piles of stones off to the side of a field. A new road on the edge of town has revealed a farm where clearly decades of work has gone into building a stone wall (like those ancient walls in Ireland, I can’t help but think) along the edge of the field (see above).

And along with the bathtub Madonnas this area is known for, here and there you’ll see a handmade chimney (this one on a very ordinary 1950s house).

Driving around on a rainy day, I was looking for (but never found) a field I love because it has been abandoned to the stones.

What I did find was this little plowed field and an old tractor, where the farmer had just plowed in circles around the rocks at the center.

To read the poem, go to: http://cowbird.com/story/70148/Fieldstone/