After many weeks of working with clay, today I was working with concrete. It's funny, even during the most stressful times of brick-making, I never felt like I needed to be a machine- it was always distinctly human work, and the laborious tasks, such as sorting clay, also had a meditative side. Concrete is a different story. Perhaps due to the shorter working time, and the irreversible nature of the process, I was acutely aware of the limits of my body and the inefficiencies of working by hand. Luckily I had help, in the form of Paul the gardener. We marched the formwork across the field. For other, heavier, things, we used the lawn tractor with the trailer. In order to use less concrete, we put a base layer of flint (there was lots lying around, of course). It worked well to space the wire mesh, too. We stretched a chain of extension cords across the field in order to get the concrete mixer going. We also had very long hose, but it didn't stretch quite as...
