A Wall's History

If walls could talk...

I was sand once. I was bone in the leg of a magnificent beast long since passed, and I am the weathered chips of fallen mountains reaching for the sky. I have known the touch of rain and fire, the brush of wind and feathers. I have tumbled and compacted, eroded and compiled. I am eternal and changing, forever present in some form or another.

The hands that built my current state were different from the patient passage of time. They were rough, urgent, warm. They gathered each of my pieces, my stones, and brought them together. I was lifted away from the sweeping fields I had known for the past thousand years, and I was risen from the ground a balanced wall. So carefully those hands crafted me, each stone selected for the best weight and shape to help me stand. The parts of me that were once mountains rejoiced to again be lifted from the ground, and gathered as a larger whole.

It was now that I was complete that all my separate pieces thought as one. I stood square with a hollow center, and a gap in one side. The hands left that gap so they could enter and exit my boarders. I knew this from the vibrations their footsteps sent through the ground to me, and the occasional brush against my sides. Those hands built a garden inside of me. I knew from the thin roots that shifted the ground, and the rain that touched my inner boarders only when those hands were inside.

The hands that built me brought a more delicate set of fingers before the cold-snow came, and their touch seldom came to visit me. With the melting of the cold came mosses that gripped to my sides like fur. With those mosses came a troupe of bugs and plants. I often felt the brush of a hedgehog’s quills inside the little caverns of shelter I offered, and the sharp claws of birds perching on my surface.

Those hands came back with the warmth of the sun, and they brought others with them. The delicate fingers drifted over my bumpy surface, and the hot touch of smaller, softer hands. Those smaller hands came with a back that would often lean against me, and as the season’s passed its feet would perch atop me like a bird.

The hands that built me weathered faster than I did. The delicate fingers and small hands followed soon after. They grew frail when I was still strong, and shook when I was still steady. I do not remember the last time any of those hands that were my companions touched my surface. It could have been a thousand years since, but I was not saddened. I took comfort that one day I might meet them again in the form of stones, that were once bones, that were once hands.

Thick trees grew up where there used to be been fields. I knew this from the wide roots that shifted the earth in waves. Vines crawled over my mosses, and mice claimed my caverns from the hedgehogs. Rabbits often visited the garden plants that had long since run wild, and water softened the dirt to settle me deeper into my seat.

So ingeniously those hands had crafted me so long ago. Even now, a stone was yet to fall, and my sides were yet to crumble. I became the perch too many nests, and host too many cocoons. Even larger creatures made of fur would lean against my solid side to rest.

It was a day where the brush of wind was strong that the first of my stones fell. The loss of that piece was small, but telling of the new time to come.

When a great tree crashed into me, I shuddered. The rattle of the impact let a few stones loose, but it was not the impact that did the most damage. It was the seasons and years of pressure that the tree brought. Everyday another stone fell, rejoining the earth.

I did not count the number of things that brought me down. Four sides became, three, three become two, and soon I was one side alone. I stood like this for quite some time. Long enough for the trees around me to be taken by the heat of fire, a fire that strengthened the bond of my pieces.

It was many seasons barren before the mosses came back, and then the roots, and then the birds. Hedgehogs never returned.

The final thing that felled me was a great shaking of the earth. I tipped as one piece, and scattered to a thousand upon hitting the ground. What had once been fields, and then forests, and then fire, and then wasteland, was now a rocky plain.

Time weathered my pieces. I became sand. I became bone. I stretched to the sky with mountains, and flew in the beaks of birds. Aged and endless I forgot many things, but I never forgot those hands which built me into something that time never could.