I was walking across the Bowdoin campus yesterday for something. There was a sort of broadening of the path, an intersection of two paths and a platform, with a stone circle in the middle with plants in it. The sidewalk was big concrete blocks, wide and squarer than those on the sidewalks around here. Between and surrounding the squares were small strips of cobblestones -- a swath about two feet wide consisting of four inch rough cut granite cubes surrounded by sand and dirt, a few small weeds growing between them here and there.
A workman was on his knees straddling one of the cobblestone strips, a pile of those small granite blocks stacked beside him. "Are you taking them out or putting them in?" I asked him. "Both," he said. "I'm pulling them up and raising them so they're all even, and even with the sidewalk. So they don't present a trip hazard." Indeed, I noticed that one of the strips was freshly levelled, new brown sand packed around the cubes, which were tidy and straight. The strips that hadn't been replaced weren't wildly uneven, just a little unruly, the way cobblestones get.
I wished the workman a good day and walked along, looking at the ground. I thought about the students, who will be back in a few weeks, and wondered if any of them will notice how exactly the cobblestones are laid, or even that they don't ever trip on that plaza. I thought about stewardship, and the special places that we want to take care of. The slanting summer afternoon light was on a backhoe and some construction fence on the other side of campus, and as I looked at it and wondered what was being built or renovated I hardly noticed a second workman, pulling up cobblestones.
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