There’s Manitou in Every Stone

Some More Rows of Stones by the Grocery Store

   Maybe I was in the third grade the first time I walked around these rows of stones, up behind the car dealership my friend’s grandfather owned. That's the old building, just touching the number 3 in the photo below taken right around that time in the mid-sixties:

   These days there’s a big box grocery store up there and the car dealership expanded.

   There’s three or four roads that were not there in the old days, lined with houses – and the part we hung out in the most had already been touched by bulldozers and backhoes making it the ideal place to wear our helmets and drink from canteens carrying plastic automatic rifles so realistic that we’d be either a news story or dead if it happened today...

   These days I look at the rows of stones in a different way from what I had previously learned about New England Stone Walls in the first half of my life, but I still don’t forget that the earliest of fences around here were wooden rail fences. 

   These tossed stones are assumed to have been a linear dump for unwanted stones under a Cross and Rail Fence in the case of these stones. I look at stone walls and I wonder, in the second half of my life, if I’m looking at a far older humanized landscape maintained for who knows how long with Ceremonies of Renewal, prayers and fires...

   Tossed Stones or Indigenous Iconography of Turtle Island?

   Sometimes adding an eye can bring an Icon alive – which is kinda silly, because I know:

There’s Manitou in Every Stone...

Circular or oval or something sort of roundish:

    At a "Very Narrow Little Gateway" or breach in this particular segment of this row of stones, my impression is that there's a Guarding Serpent or two or more suggested by the choice and placement of the stones, another field observation of Serpent Stacking, perhaps not a stone wall as such, but a fuel break that may be a larger Stone Serpent with a body composed of "Entwined Serpents," and, well, who knows what else... 

On the other side of the big grocery store, looking at the car dealership:

That photo was used here:

http://wakinguponturtleisland.blogspot.com/2014/03/hamburger-edge-of-watertown-ct-again.html

Just Another Boulder Mortar (Watertown CT)

At the Bulldozer's Edge on the Hamburger Side of Town 

Above: “A Turtle Shaped Mortar” from Connecticut’s Indigenous Peoples (2013) by Dr. Lucianne Lavin. That is my photo from 9/2008. 

  It was just a little walk along a row of stones at the northeast corner of the parking lot:

Just past this, looking southeast:

Here: looking northwest:

West:

Keyword "Grocery:"

https://wakinguponturtleisland.blogspot.com/search?q=grocery

Keyword "Senior:"

https://wakinguponturtleisland.blogspot.com/search?q=senior

also "Straits:"

https://wakinguponturtleisland.blogspot.com/search?q=straits

Boulder Mortars:

https://www.flickr.com/photos/34580529@N04/albums/72157659255351505 

Snake Head Landscape Boulder

   They bulldozed those old "stone walls," on the edge of my great grandparents' farm, and a few big boulders ended up at the edge of the old road that goes to "The Big Stone Where We Fish."

That old farmer's fence makes good fill for a new driveway...

      And why not? You know: I've got a book that tells me those stones were just field clearing garbage, never meant to be a real fence, stones tossed up against the wooden rails of a zigzag Snake Fence...

I remember passing by a big quartz boulder, maybe this one, incorporated into one of many rows of stones I walked along, many years ago when I went to take a look at the parcel still remaining in the family. Perhaps it was this one, perhaps not...

    Earlier that day, on the long way to the grocery store:

Black and White Stones (Woodbury CT)

or

 The Kid with the Snow Plow

    The kid with the snow plow suddenly stopped back plowing and instead pushed all the snow up into the stone wall along my driveway. I stopped shoveling out the three cars and struggled through the drifts, waving my arms but he backed up and rammed it again. I stumbled out into the road and knocked on the window, let him know I didn’t want a 300 year old wall knocked apart.

   So as the huge pile melts, exposed stones absorbing heat from the sun, I’m looking to see what damage was done – the amount of snow may have prevented a direct hit by the plow itself and I am hoping what is still under snow looks as fairly intact as the little bit I can see today.

    But the second surprise was the stones that just happened to be the first I can see:

     I have really only recently been paying attention to this wall as an Indigenous-made stone feature, stonework of the Nonnewaug band of the Pootatuck, who during Contact Period times lived across the river from this house of undetermined age. Dr. Curtis Hoffman stopped by for a quick look one time, skeptical at first but soon agreeing with me about the Native American Iconography – lots of snake and turtle artwork imagery. There’s some snake-head-like qualities to that stone above that were suddenly apparent – in fact it greatly resembles another probable snake-head-like stone a few miles away:

http://wakinguponturtleisland.blogspot.com/2016/05/its-easy-to-make-snake-part-two.html

http://wakinguponturtleisland.blogspot.com/2015/10/serpents-at-edge-of-white-deer-rocks.html

    So I look up, thinking about the black and white stones combination of a recent post at RockPiles:http://rockpiles.blogspot.com/2017/03/behind-grocery-store-watertown-ct.html}. 

    I picked out two small stones in the flower bed below the end of this retaining wall, placing them where they are in this photo below:

   Turtle maybe, probably, definitely but it’s also a snake, right? Images and images within the images, multiple images - that's also a diagnostic of Indigenous Stonework in many places. Aren’t those jaws?? And if that’s a spot for an eye, then wouldn’t the black stone be a pupil, the white stone becoming the obvious “White of the Serpent’s Eye?” What if I switch them?? Would it make the Stone Serpent "come alive??"