The Crying Rock

In 1992, I moved into the farmhouse where my mother was born. Our family of three, soon to be four, had gone from living in town with a postage-stamp sized backyard to a 60-acre parcel that included an 1890s farmhouse, barns, farm ground, and wooded acreage. Initially my mother had been against selling us the farm that she had inherited from her mother. My father, however, was not of the same mind as he would be the one doing the necessary maintenance and repairs. They were clearly at an impasse, so my husband and I decided to look elsewhere for a place in the country. The occupants of the rental house next to our home in town were screamers and frequently called their children in for supper using a string of four-letter words. I knew that one of those words would find their way into my daughter’s vocabulary if we didn’t move fairly quickly. My husband and I had both grown up on farms, and the charm of life in town with close neighbors had worn off.

It was mid-July and I called my parents one afternoon to see if they could watch our daughter while my husband and I went to look at a place that had just come up for sale in a neighboring town. They said they would, and ten minutes later as we were about to leave our house, the phone rang. It was my dad, and he had convinced my mom that it was time to sell the farm. My mom would later tell us that her reluctance was due to the house being so close to a busy highway and the risk it posed to our young children. She had lost her first husband as well as her only sibling on this farm and selling the place to us probably seemed like courting disaster. By the time the sale was completed, it was late September and my husband assured her that as soon as spring came he would build a picket fence the entire length of the front yard. In January, our son arrived, and in April the fence went up. A swing, a sandbox, and a playhouse were later added to the backyard so that neither of our children would have a reason to go anywhere near the road.

The lawn next to the fence, however, still needed to be mowed. Always mindful of the speeding semis that were less than 20 feet away, I kept my eyes on them rather than where I was going as I mowed the long stretch of grass beside the highway every week. And every week I would hit the same flat rock that jutted out of the ground, the sudden scrape of the lawnmower blade jerking me out of my vigilant watch for distracted drivers. I mentioned the rock to my mom one day and she knew exactly what rock I was talking about.

“That’s my old crying rock,” she said.

Immediately I imagined some mysterious phenomenon – a rock that wept. Or did it have an imprint of a face on it that looked like someone crying?

“No,” she continued. “That’s where I always went to sit and cry when I was little.”

I couldn’t imagine my grandmother letting her sit that close to the road, but she reminded me that in the 1930s she roller skated out on this same stretch of concrete. The crying rock sat beneath a massive maple tree back then, and I had to agree that it would have been a good place to sit and cry. That afternoon when I left her house, I went home and got out my shovel. If ever a rock deserved a place of honor, this one did. Given its location, it wasn’t practical to leave it there, and since I seemed to have something to cry about most days, I was determined to move it to a better place.

I spent close to an hour digging around it. The crying rock would not budge. I enlisted my husband to dig it up, thinking it would pop out of the ground within minutes. It did not. He went to get his tractor with the small backhoe. It still wasn’t moving. He looked at me as if hoping that I would tell him to never mind – just forget it. I did not. He got the bigger tractor with the front loader and tried to dig into the dirt a few feet away. We were getting nowhere. He went back and forth between the two tractors for a while, working from different angles and directions. We were quickly realizing that the visible part of the rock was deceptively small. Just over an hour later, the tines of the backhoe caught the rock in just the right place and it came up out of the ground with an audible thud. We both stepped back and looked at it. The crying rock was three feet wide and nearly three feet tall. He rummaged around behind the barn and found an old car hood to roll it onto and told me to decide where I wanted this thing because he was only moving it once. To date, it has been moved four times and finally, after 25 years, I am satisfied that it is exactly where it should be.

The crying rock now sits in a flower bed at the front corner of my house, its permanent placement until the next generation takes over. I don’t seem to have as much to cry about these days, so it’s become somewhat of an all-purpose rock. I sit there when I’ve overdone the weeding or planting and need to catch my breath. I leave split peanuts on it for the birds during the winter months and watch from my kitchen windows as the bluejays grab them away from the smaller birds. Mostly I’m just grateful for its presence here as a connection to the child who sat on it in the 1930s. I wonder what stories this rock could tell about her and the things that made her cry as a child. Maybe the stinging remarks of her aunt:

“You wouldn’t be pretty at all if it weren’t for your hair.” (Her own daughter had unruly, mousy brown hair in contrast to my mother’s headful of shiny black ringlets.)

Or her older brother’s cutting words when he was told to walk his little sister the ½ mile to the country schoolhouse after something had scared her when she’d attempted to walk there by herself. The ‘something’ turned out to be a garbage bag that was caught in the branches of a tree.

“You’re as useless as tits on a boar hog,” he’d told her. At 95, she had never forgotten it. “Wasn’t that an awful thing to say to a little girl?!” she would huff whenever she retold the story, shaking her head in disgust.

I’m fairly certain that this rock still has stories yet to hear. Cars fly by so fast that I doubt anyone even notices the aging woman sitting on a huge rock in her flower bed, which means I am free to vent about all the people and things that still make me furious but rarely make me cry. The crying rock has yet to give up any stories that I haven’t already heard, and maybe that’s a good thing. Most rocks are fairly good listeners, but the exceptional ones know how to keep a secret.