George of the back yard

Behind the shop lay a pile of bricks. Pile, not stack. Had the bricks been stacked, my job would have been easier. Not easy, because closer to 70 than to 60 as I am, many things no longer happen easy. The people who built the house 15 years ago piled the bricks behind the shop. I don’t know why. I don’t know how they piled the bricks, since close-together trees border three sides of the shop and the only way to get that many bricks in a pile would be to carry them an armful at a time or in a wheelbarrow, and neither of those is likely. Maybe the bricks were piled there before the shop was built. I figured there were 200 bricks, some piled atop each other, others covered by mossy dirt. What I didn’t know … Well, I’ll get to that. Or those. Priscilla has made plans for beautifying the back yard. We got 240 feet of chain link fence three years ago, and now we need to put in walkways and a few other things. We figure the bricks will make nice borders for sand or gravel walkways so the two dogs (55 pounds and 85 pounds) won’t stir up dust when they go running after nothing. They will stir sand or gravel, but it you’ve had dogs pretty much kill most of the grass, you won’t mind a little sand or gravel. I decided to stack the bricks just outside the backyard fence. So, I drove my pickup into the woods and then backed up to the brick/dirt/moss pile and started stacking bricks on the tailgate. When I got 200 on the tailgate I figured out: There are at least 200 more. At least. Not counting what might be beneath the dirt and moss and leaves. If the dirt covers more bricks (and I think that is the case, judging from what I’ve gone through so far) I’m looking at moving maybe 400 more bricks. Maybe 500. That many will make a lot of walkway border. The tailgate had what I figured a good load, so I drove forward and then began backing up and away from the pile of bricks. Everything was going OK until -- I backed between two trees and one side of the pickup didn’t. Well, it did, but not without paint scraping and metal bending and now I have brown bark stripes on what was pristine white. Oh, and the hinged gas access dived into the leaves. Watch out for that … Too late.