The Wall Builder – Part 1: Dry Stone

"Don't hand me that one," said Mara.

"Why not?"

"It isn't ready yet."

Orla looked at the grey stone in her hands. It looked like all the others. "How can you tell?"

"It tells me." Mara took it, turned it once, and set it gently back in the pile. "Not every stone belongs in every place. You wait until it's right."

The wall had collapsed in the winter storms, a long stretch of dry stone running down the Connemara hillside towards a silver lake. Orla, thirty-nine, a landscape architect from Dublin, had inherited the field and a stubborn belief that old things should be mended properly. Mara, thirty-four, the waller, had arrived in a mud-splashed pickup with a flask, a bucket of tools and a thick wool hat pulled low over her red hair.

She built without mortar, each stone fitted to the next by weight and shape alone, as her grandfather had taught her. She hummed under her breath while she worked. Rain drifted in off the Atlantic, soft and constant, and she did not seem to notice it.

Orla came every day. She told herself it was to supervise. She carried stones and made tea. She learned the names, throughs, copes, hearting. By the second week Mara had stopped telling her to stay out of the way and started saying, "Here, hold this."

"Why dry stone?" Orla asked, one grey afternoon.

"Because it holds without anyone forcing it." Mara wiped her hands. "Mortar is stubborn. Stone only needs to be fitted."

"I like that."

"So do I." Mara looked up, rain on her lashes. "Orla. I'd like to ask you something and you can say no."

"Go on."

"Would you let me kiss you?"

Continue the story: Part 2 – Turf Fire.

Continue the story: Part 2 – Turf Fire.