The beginning of May shouldn’t have been that hot.  It was 1993, my first day working on the Lazy Tc, and it was almost ninety degrees.  Jimmy Mulroney and I had driven out together that morning- it wasn’t his first day, but Dale’s reluctance to hire a “smart kid” meant that after he’d already hired Jimmy for the summer, I had to beg a little bit.  That is how I found myself, without any water, out in the middle of a sixty acre field over at the Hassing place, maybe five miles from the house.  Jimmy and I were both thirsty.

I think Dale was still trying to get rid of me, and maybe Jimmy too.  I doubt he’d have admitted it, even at the time, but I basically showed up at the house, met him and his son Mike and the hired hands, and then Mike took Jimmy and me over to the Hassing place with five-gallon buckets and instructions to take rocks out of the field and dump them in the ditch. I looked up the Hassing place on Google maps, and it looks about the same as it did then, except Dale and Mike must have put one of those new pivot irrigation systems in. Had wheel lines when I was working for them, and most of my job was keeping thirty or so wheel lines running for the summer.

Anyway, that’s all just a long lead up to say something that people don’t know about rocks: they grow. Rocks start deep down in the ground, and as time goes on they just work their way up to the top. I never would have believed it, except Mike and Pork (he was one of the hired hands) told me so, and then I saw it for myself. For the three summers I worked for Dale, whenever I saw a rock in that field I picked it up and carried it to the edge, and they never did stop coming up. I’m not exactly clear on the mechanics of it, and when Mike first told me I thought he was just trying to make me sound like a complainer, but rocks grow up like anything else- a plant or a weed or a thorn or a bad feeling. Maybe just a little slower.

Anyway, Mike showed up just before noon, and gave us a hard time for not bringing any water with us (as if we needed him to drive the point home), and took us back to the house. Jimmy and I sat out on the lawn and ate our bag lunches, and everyone else ate dinner in the house. I wasn’t clear on it all at that point, but later on I’d eat dinner with Dale and Mike and the hired hands, and Bernice’s cooking was a sight better than anything I could put in a brown bag. Plus there was more of it, and it was always exactly at noon. Bernice ran a tight ship.

After a few more days of picking rocks, I think Dale and Mike decided they couldn’t get rid of me, or Jimmy either for that matter, so the work started to get a little more interesting, even if it wasn’t any easier. While I was still picking rocks, I thought about the Parable of the Sower, how I always imagined the rocks in that story to be the things in life that you just couldn’t change, but I was wrong about that. Rocks are just weeds that grow a little slower. And like weeds, if they weren’t growing in the wrong place, I suppose I’d get along with them just fine.