SPRING THAWS AND STONE WALLS. The stone walls here in Connecticut memorialize the spring thaws of the past, as this post from an always interesting free market blog describes.
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I think I’ve told you this story before: when I was in elementary school, I’d ride the school bus every morning and play the “holding your breath game,” with the simple rules that you must hold your breath as the bus went past a stone wall. You could breathe when there was a driveway, another type of wall, or no wall at all. It sounds silly but it helped pass the time, plus I think it helped me hold my breath when I had swimming lessons. The best part was it was eminently doable, since practically every yard on the route to school had a stone wall, plus they all had driveways.
A few years later, in middle school I guess, I was interested to learn about how farmers made the stone walls with the rocks they dug up in the process of doing their farming. I enjoyed this article because it added to this knowledge, giving some geological reasons for why they had so many rocks to add to the walls. This actually came up in one of the Little House spin-off books. In their new home in Missouri, Laura and her daughter Rose are preparing the ground for a garden and have to spend many days removing rocks from the earth. Rose complains that the year before they had gotten the garden free of rocks and wondered why they were there again, and Laura sympathizes, “I know, the ground here just seems to grow them.”