Brick layers

Last weekend I watched as my husband pulled up chain link fence posts from around our house. There were nine posts that needed to come out, each one with a twenty pound slug of cement around the bottom. I felt for him, but I have too much respect for my back to have offered to help. Earlier he'd found a black snake under a piece of old linoleum in the corner by the house. The snake must've been cold because it waited there while he went inside to get his camera and snap a hundred pictures of it before finally slithering off somewhere. The snake was the other reason I wasn't out there.

We're working on putting in a patio right outside the back door. I've been dreaming of one since we moved here. We hadn't done much about it before this for two good reasons: we weren't sure what kind of patio we wanted to install and we didn't have any money to put one in anyway.

Last week we eliminated both obstacles when we found the bricks for our project in a nearby roadbed that the city is in the process of widening and repaving. Underneath layers of concrete and asphalt was a nine foot wide swath of bricks, laid down sometime around the beginning of the 20th century, part of a road that goes through Jacksonville south to St. Augustine and beyond.

Some of the bricks have diamonds molded into the tops. Some say Graves B'ham Ala on them, some say Southern Clay Mfg Co. Some don't say anything at all. The colors range from deep red to yellowish to orange. A few are chipped, most are intact, some look as though they were taken out of the mold before they'd quite set up and laid across a curved surface to cool. These warped ones are my favorites.

By the time we were through hauling we had about a thousand bricks. A guy we met while grubbing around in the dirt told us that each brick weighs about ten pounds. It made me feel a whole lot tireder to know this. It made my youngest son feel a whole lot stronger. He started hefting them two at a time after that.

There were quite a few people out there digging in the roadbed besides us. One guy, Mike, was loading about sixty bricks at a time into his little white sports car. He was rueful about it. "My buddy was supposed to come with his truck," he said. Mike told us his wife was not crazy about all the bricks he'd been bringing home and stacking around his house. This was in sharp contrast to my husband's wife, me, who not only approved of free bricks but was actually helping to lever them out. For the record, I only accompanied my husband on eight trips. He and the boys did the rest on their own. I'm a cheapskate, but I'm a cheapskate with a bad back. See above.

Some people were collecting them to sell. I found an e-bay listing with links to information about the Old Brick Road and the Dixie Highway. Vitreous bricks were considered a big step up from the sea shells and sand normally used for road surfacing and Jacksonville alone had seven miles of brick road. My two boys were more interested in what the seller was getting for them, which was a buck and a quarter each, in lots of 250, delivery extra.

Once we had the bricks we started wondering about where we could get the sand to cement the things when they were all laid out. My husband suggested Lowe's but I thought, why spoil a perfectly free patio project by buying dirt for it?

So my first idea was to dig a hole in the yard, since Florida is basically a big sandbox floating on the ocean. "Didn't you want a koi pond?" I asked my husband hopefully, but he said he was just thinking about something small and trough-like, and nothing as big as we'd need to get enough sand to fill in all the cracks between the bricks, as well as a two inch layer over the pea gravel.

Then I remembered the drainage ditch out behind the house. There's a shoulder along it just behind our fence that's a favorite all terrain path for the local teenagers and their grandparents' golf carts. If we dug our hole there and covered it up with palm fronds we could get all the free sand we'd ever need as well as put an end to off road golf carting. My husband agreed with all of this plan except the part where I trap my neighbors' children in a pit and so sometime this week I expect to put my sons to work hauling dirt and sifting it in their free time.

The downside to free bricks is that it's pretty labor intensive. Recently I took a rock hammer and chipped old asphalt off bricks for a couple hours. If the boys and I do fifty a day for the next twenty days they'll be all cleaned up and ready to lay down in a few weeks. By the time I've gone through them all I'll feel as though I know them personally.

I'm looking forward (probably pretty far forward) to sitting out on the patio in the morning, sipping my coffee and imagining the sounds of horses' hooves clippety clopping over those bricks, seeing in my mind old Model T's with families out for a drive, clattering over the same stretch of road years later. It would have been a lot different back then. Not nearly as many people. There would have been a lot more trees and shade and the smell of swamp just about everywhere.

Now that we have all the bricks we need I'm anxious to finish our patio. The bricks are patient, however. They've waited a hundred years to be found by us. Another week or two won't matter. It's me that can hardly wait.