Rockpiles

The parlor games continue as does the beeping. The worst offender, a little Bobcat type machine that can swivel 180 degrees but makes the infernal beeps when it is backing up, is back. With the help of its much larger cousin, a big yellow John Deere shovel on tank treads, all this rock and dirt has been removed from the building site, sifted and sorted into piles. A few of the biggest boulders were saved for the 'garden', the rest were built into a retaining wall for the driveway or hauled away in dump trucks. 

They moved a lot of this dirt back to backfill the foundation trenches, but apparently that was not sufficient, so it was moved back up again. Now the trenches are being filled with commercial gravel. 

In an effort to control my brain's hamster wheel activity as it tries to make sense of the senseless, I have come to one conclusion. All the best, most well reasoned arguments will never change minds. The only thing that will change them is a story. And in order for stories to be told, we need connections.

I'm going to quote a bit of a story from the Washington Post that was in yesterday's paper:

UVALDE, Texas
For years even as mass shootings swept the country, Richard Small bristled at any talk of any tighter gun restrictions, viewing it as nothing more than politically driven  finger-pointing that would do little to stop the violence while infringing on his rights as a gun owner.

But then, the 68-year-old retired high school history teacher saw a photo of one of the young victims of Tuesday's shooting at Robb Elementary school in Uvalde, a pleasant little town that he's visited frequently when he coached youth football.

"He looked like my grandson, I mean, they could have been twins. They have the same face," Small said, his voice shaky with emotion. It just stirred something in me"

...Small and his wife drove nearly 90 minutes from their ranch ...south of San Antonio, to pay their respects in Uvalde. He stood on the edge of the city's town square where 21 crosses, for the 19 fourth-graders and two teachers killed in the shooting, have become the epicenter of the city's anguish. Somehow, tears didn't feel enough.

On Saturday night, Small, a self described "devout NRA Republican", did what he acknowledged would have been unthinkable days earlier. He unlocked his gun cabinet and pulled out his AR-15, similar to the one used by the gunman in Uvalde. He drove to his local police department and turned it in.

Sometimes it takes a picture of somebody who looks just like your grandson to shake you out of your bubble.