Last May, my wife went to the Pelham town plant sale, and came home with a rhododendron bush, which she asked me to help her plant in our front yard, off to the right of the driveway. I am no gardener at all, but she enlists me from time to time for digging and hauling and such like chores. So I got my shovel, and dug it into the New England dirt right where she pointed. Naturally, I hit a rock. “How about over here?” I suggested, pointing to what I hoped was a more welcoming bit of ground, but no, she wanted it right there, so I tried again. When I had mapped the edges of the rock by a series of probes, cleared away the dirt, and pried it up with my pickaxe, I was sweating, and my back—never too strong—was beginning to protest. The stone must have weighed over thirty pounds, and I dragged it gingerly a few yards away, where it would be partially hidden by some tall grass.

As I straightened up, my eye fell on the old stone wall that runs along the North-East edge of our land. It is one of those falling-down old walls that you see marching through the woods all through New England, marking the boundaries of what was, two centuries ago, working farm land. I looked at the wall, then I looked down at the rock I had just dug out of the ground with such effort, and suddenly I was struck by a very simple thought that had never before occurred to me. Every one of the hundreds upon hundreds of rocks in that old wall had been dug out of this unforgiving soil with shovel and pickaxe in exactly the same way. For the very first time, my highly educated, privileged, upper middle class mind really understood the meaning of the cliché “back-breaking labor.”