The Monaca Doken guys surprised me twice on Tuesday. Once by moving a boulder to form The Giant’s Teeth, and again when they built me a staircase of foundation stones.
The stairs sit at the northwest corner of the house, which will be the kitchen. They reach from the end of the retaining wall up to the slope behind the house, filling in a little gap at the corner of the drainage.
Previously, there was a little shrine here. Kawasaki-san took it apart it before we started the building the retaining wall and stored the pieces in the shed. Sakaguchi-san remembered this and decided to put some stairs leading up towards its former site so that when the house is built, we will have a good place to return this little monument. There’s a space up on the mountain ridge where there used to be a shrine of some sort. It’s blown away or fallen down in storms. I think the little shrine was another place for that god to reside. I am happy to welcome back the local spirits.
The staircase took the better part of a day to lay in. There were decisions and changes, measurements, searches for more stones, and careful chipping of protrusions and old cement. The work was a mix of heavy equipment and manual labor by all four of us.
The resulting staircase is quirky, full of memories already, and I love it. Now my mapping project has a new spot to label: the Kitchen Stairs.
