My Religious Thoughts on Rocks

“It’s all downhill from here.” That saying pretty much sums up the walk from the living room to the kitchen–sure, there is some rolling terrain in the dining room, where the floorboards gently rise and fall over a few uneven joists, but generally you’re losing a few inches in elevation whenever you visit the refrigerator. Little topographical quirks really distinguish old farmhouses from modern builds that are mostly bland, banal, and level. 

Years ago, when we first bought the old farmhouse from my wife’s grandpa, I undertook the process of trying to jack up the house at various spots. I spent many hours crawling around underneath the house, pondering deep philosophical questions, like whether the desire for level floors was a vain desire? After several muscle groups sent a distress signal to my nervous system, I decided that the desire for level floors was the vanity of all vanities. Mostly, I just laid underneath the house and annoyed all the spiders living in the crawlspace. I’m not sure if spiders have ears, but I hope none of them pull a Charlotte’s Web and write what I was muttering.

Our house sits on short fieldstone piers. Why my wife’s ancestors built the house so close to the ground is beyond me. It’s not like there was a shortage of fieldstones. We have all makes and models of fieldstone: big ones, little ones, and some exotic foreign makes that were imported underneath glaciers. I know about the origin and morphology of rocks because in third grade I collected rocks. Unfortunately, I never found any good rocks–just boring gray igneous rocks, which were a dime a dozen in a gravel driveway. 

Anyway, Jesus said to build your house on rock. Should you decide to do that, just be sure the rock piers provide adequate space for crawling.