Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: SATURDAY, March 7, 1992                   TAG: 9203070264
SECTION: EXTRA                    PAGE: E-1   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: BEN BEAGLE
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium

IT'S ALL DOWNHILL - WITH BRICKS

Spring starts months of honest, heart-breaking toil. That's what it does.

If you want to to know the meaning of fear and honest toil combined, try loading a wheelbarrow full of bricks and then let it pull you down your back yard at high speeds.

That's right. I said down.

Normal back yards may be flat. Mine has the approximate pitch of a minor peak in the Alps. Sometimes you need oxygen at the upper part.

Your life passes before your eyes when you run behind a wheelbarrow loaded with bricks down an incline like that.

We are obsessed with bricks this spring. Last spring it was grass. The year before that it was azaleas.

I risked my life hiding these modern bricks in a place by the fence that will be shielded from prying eyes when the leaves come out.

I know these bricks will have to come back up the hill some day, but I don't want to talk about that, if you don't mind.

But for now, they have holes in them and are thus unsuitable for an extension of the brick square outside the kitchen door.

This square is made of whole bricks, some of them mossed up rather nicely.

They came from a house in Salem that was more than 100 years old - and you can't beat anything that old that comes from Salem.

Before I hid the modern bricks, I tried to convince a certain party that two of these bricks, turned on their sides, would look a little like a whole one.

I got the usual lecture on how a man my age might at least try to have a little taste and was told to search for whole bricks.

We all know that bricks from 100-year-old houses in Salem come along just once in your lifetime.

So, you turn to the people who make bricks and find that you can buy modern bricks with no holes in them. Shouldn't matter that they're new. They'll moss up before we know it.

Sounds great, but to save money you have to pick up these bricks yourself, which means bending.

And carrying 200 bricks will be a strain on the Cherokee, which hasn't seemed the same since the ceiling light fell out last month.

This is not to mention the strain on yours truly here.

If I can pick up five bricks at a time, that means I will have to bend over 40 times.

It's possible that this might be life threatening to a man with my torso dimensions.

So what? It's better to go that way than trying to push a wheelbarrow full of bricks up a hill.