I thought we could put a nice patio just out the back door. For one thing, that would take care of some square footage. The whole yard was being redone after our addition and I aspired to having no lawn at all, which meant I was in for a ton of horticultural maintenance. People whine about having to mow the lawn but it’s no big deal to scalp a short monoculture. But throw in a decent-size patio, at least that part was taken care of. Right?

You know, mostly. What Dave decided to do was use that area as his canvas for one cubic shit-ton of masonry. He wanted to cut pavers to perfection and lay them in some kind of pattern, which sounds straightforward enough if you have no skills, but unfortunately Dave did. This was going to be complicated.

The creator, with friend

I suggested he could make a Bear’s Paw pattern. That’s a readily recognizable quilt pattern and all my quilting buddies would pick up on it right away. Dave didn’t go that route, and frankly, what he did decide on required a lot more precision. Ultimately he made a patio with a center circle for a fire pit and radii of block, terminating in some tiny confetti-size triangles of paver, and he started by pouring a square border of concrete, but just shy of level, so that the eventual plane would carry water away from the house. Then he cut and installed five billion precisely cut pieces of paver laid without mortar—touching all around—that miraculously all fit perfectly. And shed water. It was a triumph. The Army Corps of Engineers is bugging him to design a dam.

Yes, sir, you couldn’t fit a credit card between the pavers anywhere. But plants could infiltrate. Mostly we got moss, which is fine, but tons of tiny weeds intervened as well, and after a nice damp winter that patio was sprouting. That patio was looking like a bald man with new plugs. For years we used a power washer on it. But that blasted a lot of the underlying sand out. I started tossing pots of boiling water over the cracks but hit my toes often as not. I tried vinegar. Seemed stupid. What’s next: croutons?

So this year I noticed that a lot of the joints were filled with moss, and maybe if that were encouraged it would keep the pointy weeds out. I started to try to pluck out the weeds. With, like, tweezers. I did a whole quadrant of the patio that way. Visualize Michelangelo painting the Sistine Chapel with a bundle of eyelashes. Then, hell. I just started in with my hori hori knife and scooped out the joints, moss and all. All five billion of them.

And while I was down there scraping away inch by inch, I truly appreciated the feat Dave had accomplished. This patio is now 25 years old. And, weeds notwithstanding, it would still be level, draining, perfect. The weather has not touched it. The power washer has not destroyed it. Weed roots have not rumpled it.

Ants, however.

Ants are a successful species. There are about 2.5 million ants in existence for every human being. That’s five million ants for Dave and me alone. They take vacations in our kitchen, but mostly they live under our patio.

This patio would still be perfect if ants had not undermined it. But they love Dave’s patio even more than we do and they’ve been shoveling sand out from under it for 25 years. Still, the worst of the blocks have subsided only a quarter inch in all that time. And only in the portions where I had to go and put a pot of flowers. They love to live under my flower pots. If you’re not a fan of grubs and goobers, you really don’t want to move those pots. Fully 3/4 of the patio is still perfect. It is absolutely extraordinary. It’s still a pain in the ass. It’s this amazing, perfectly engineered, precise as hell pain in the ass.

It’s Mount Rushmore. Such an extraordinary achievement! The work of a master! Probably should never have been done.