STONE DUST

Stone dust is really heavy. It comes in heavy plastic bags that weigh 50 or 60 pounds, and when you put them in the car they make a thumping sound
and they weigh down the trunk pretty obviously and the car squeaks when it goes over any bumps.
It's hard to pick them up again too, you have to crouch down and heft them up, and walk slowly, and the sooner you can finally put them down the better.
But stone dust is a really good way to lay a masonry walkway. Because it's so heavy, it just kind of sits where you put it and if you lay the bricks on top of it, they don't move.
Especially if you pour more dust into the cracks between the bricks, and then wait for it to rain and wet the whole thing down.
When you walk on a walk like that, you can tell by the steadiness that there is stone dust underneath. It's like standing on solid rock.
Durazno was careful to teach me the importance of stone dust, and how to use it, just as he taught me all the other tools of the trade:
the rake and the sledge, and the tamp, and the tool I never knew the name of that was really good at getting giant rocks out of the ground.
Durazno is gone. He left on a night in late November, when the moon was full and the air was growing cold, and the year was dying.
But he left my ten year old soul a road into the future, as sure as if the days were laid in the stone dust in the back of the pick up parked in the driveway.