Old Stones

“I miss old stones,” my father said. We were coming out of Sunday Mass at the brand-new church of Our Lady of Sorrows, in Birmingham, Alabama. It was an architecturally harmless modern building, painted bright white inside and out. The pews were pristine, the kneelers cushioned in faux leather, and there was a “crying room” where the prolific families of the era could worship without disturbing the congregation. Enormous clear glass windows let in light, lots of light—other than inside the confessionals, there wasn’t a dark corner in the building. Despite its melancholy name, Our Lady of Sorrows was a cheerful, optimistic place.

I knew what my father was homesick for: the ancient Romanesque and Gothic churches, redolent of incense and candle wax, bathed in the uncertain light of narrow, high-up windows, the apse surrounded with cavernous chapels where statues of saints and martyrs stared out into the gloom. Churches that were full of echoes, furnished with creaky benches and wooden kneelers whose grit used to dig into my bare knees.  Despite my teenage infatuation with all things American, I knew what my father meant.

Years later, my husband and I shared a vacation house with friends in a village on the foothills of the Pyrenees. There were lots of old stones around—ruined monasteries, fallen chapels, a castle. But in the vineyards and cork-oak woods surrounding the village, there were much older stones. You’d be taking a walk in the long summer twilight, and there, in the middle of a perfectly civilized vineyard, the vines well trimmed and bearing the bluish tinge of a recent sulfate application, would be a dolmen. The table-like structure had been sitting there for perhaps seven thousand years, built by nobody knows who, or for what purpose. But the owner of the vineyard had carefully arranged the rows of vines to circumvent the object. In a neighboring village, another dolmen sat in the middle of the church square, surrounded by a ring of red geraniums—past and present jammed together before my astonished American eyes.

In the woods nearby there was a menhir, a pedra dreta (standing stone, in Catalan), taller and wider than a man, rough hewn and spotted with lichens and moss. Who had dragged it into those woods, and how? And why was it still upright, after millennia? The stone stood near the path into France used by refugees fleeing the Spanish Civil War. We used to pass it on our hikes to the French border, and I would put my hand against its pitted surface and feel something for which I had no words.

The magic of that stone had nothing to do with its size. It had to do with its having been pushed and dragged and erected in that spot by human hands, people with dark hair and eyes, and skin made to withstand the Mediterranean sun. My ancestors.

I had a fantasy about the menhir: I wanted to spend a night in its company. I imagined myself sitting propped up against it, on one of those short June nights, looking at the moon and listening to the nightingale. A millenary stone, the moon, and a lovesick bird singing in the branches—how much more elemental could you get?

But in the three or four summers we lived in the village, I never did spend a night with the stone. The house was full of friends and family to whom I would have had to explain my weird desire, and there would have been concerns about my health and safety, if not my sanity. But what really kept me from making my case was that I couldn’t fully articulate what the stone’s attraction consisted of, and because I lacked the words my rational mind ended up convincing me that my fantasy was not worth paying attention to.

Now I know better, but it is too late. I will never go back to the cork-oak wood. Still, the menhir and the moon and the nightingale live on inside me in an endless summer night. I visit them from time to time and remember my father, who sensed, although he too lacked the words, the mythic power of stone.