The excavation proceeded and concluded without any further obstacles. The footprint of the workshop was increased to accommodate the extra space required by the boulder. Aldo built up the formwork for the foundations all around and tied and laid the reinforcing bars in their place. A concrete truck brought an entire load for the foundation pour. After backing up near the pit, the driver exited the truck and walked over to the boulder, looked at it for a brief moment, turned to aldo and said “Need halp moving it?”

“Its fine as it is” Aldo said in reply.

The driver just shrugged and returned to the truck, where he would remain all day, opening and closing a hatch that dispensed concrete, oozing down a slide to fill Aldo’s wheelbarrow.

Aldo took a week off from the workshop to give space for the concrete to set and cure. The time he had available was spent dipping in the lake or sitting on the shoreline with a book, watching the boats speed by.

It was during that short break when he first saw Kahn, though he didn’t know the dog by that name yet. While sitting on the shoreline one day he noticed Kahn scavenging for food along the water’s edge, searching for anything that washed up. That very night, Aldo saw Kahn again, off in the woods, as Aldo retired to the lakehouse for dinner. He always had a soft spot for animals and it pained him to see them struggle or suffer, so after he finished eating he placed his leftovers outside on the doorstep in hopes the dog could find some nourishment. The following morning, there was Kahn, asleep at the foot of the door, the food scraps all licked up. When Aldo exited the house that day, he rubbed the dog up and down, feeling its loose skin and bony frame, and he left the dog some breakfast when he left for the lake.

• 

• 

The boulder now sat in the pit, off towards the northeast corner of the workshop footprint. Aldo descended the dozer to inspect that massive stone. The size and shape of it were perplexing to him. Never in his life had he seen any mineral that was nearly so perfectly spherical. The surface, up close, was rough and dimpled with small craters, similar to the shell of a geode. It was somber and colorless, covered in dust and dirt from being underground for ages.

In his stricken state, he broke from the labor of removing the boulder and sat on the earthen wall he had carved out of the ground, to study and admire that stone. With his sketchbook and markers, he dashed off a few quick drawings of the boulder’s form; how it sat in the pit, its relation with the background and the woods beyond. He did his best to represent the feel and the force that this rock expelled.

The sun proceeded on its usual declining course through the sky and he only left the stone to go make dinner, which he ate outside with the company of his freshly excavated companion. By the time it was dark and the boulder was barely visible, he had made up his mind to not move the stone again. Over that afternoon, he had grown to be so enamored with this odd rock that he decided it would be best to leave it where it lay and to allow it to become a part of the workshop. For how could something so incredible be discarded and slowly lost and forgotten with the sands of time? No, this boulder deserved much more. It deserved admiration and he felt it was uncovered by him to be the one that appreciated that magnificence.

The excavation and trenching was underway. Aldo would be up at first light every day to take on the back-breaking labor. All the digging was done by himself, with a shovel and a pickax. The option was open to bring in a front-end loader but he wouldn’t take that option until later. For now he wanted to see how much he could do himself.

When the pit he was digging out reached about two feet in depth he finally hit solid rock. The rock was right in line with where the foundation stem wall would be trenched so it could not be ignored. The next day he went into town and returned with a dozer in tow and a jackhammer to break up the rock into smaller pieces. The first thing he did was to go at the boulder with a jackhammer. After a continued attack on the rock, nothing had resulted, tiny flakes were chipping off but the boulder itself would not break up. He continued at it until he was finally drained, having seen no results, and the jackhammer eventually overheated. The war on the boulder continued the following day. He proceeded to dig all around the rock and unearthed what appeared to be a stone almost spherical in shape with a diameter of about five feet. This was larger than he anticipated and the only option he had now was to try and move it out of the way. He wrapped a large chain around the boulder and clipped the opposing end onto the dozer shovel. With all the strength of that small machine, it pulled and heaved and weaved side to side, trying to wiggle the boulder out of the ground. With all that force, all the loader could manage was pulling the boulder a half turn out of the ground. It now lay in the center of the pit.

Soon the smells and aura of Sheila that lingered at the house became too much for Aldo to bear. Not to mention their home had grown too small for his research and experimentation to carry on there. He quickly packed up the house, thinned out their belongings, and sold the home with the intention of permanently relocating to the lake house.

It was mid summer when he first arrived at the lake house, ready to move-in. The lake was croweded with water skiers etching ephemeral lines in the water, bikini clad women lying on boat decks absorbing the sun as if it would soon fade away, and children with inflatables and water toys splashing and playing all along the shore. There was much more comotion than he had remembered from his first visit to the lake house with Sheila. Still, he thought, that would be the perfect place for him to carry on his explorations.

It was quickly apparent that the size of the house wouldn’t suffice. All the materials, models, and tools he was working with were left in a storage container outside the house for a few months as he sketched up plans for a workshop to be built on the property. He worked tirelessly on the design of a space that he could spread out in and continue his work. There were not any formal plans needed, for there was no building department to deal with out there. The plans he sketched up were simple floor plans and construction details, all hand drawn, to help him determine how the shop would go together.

Aldo threw himself completely into his work. There wasn’t any other way he knew how to deal with the pain of losing his wife. He had never experienced anything like this loneliness and torment before and he didn’t know how to grieve or if there was a proper way to grieve. The only solution he found for handling the void in his life was to work. Because he had taken such a long hiatus, with traveling to Spain, Sheila’s fathers death, and taking care of her for a year, he did not have any active projects that demanded his attention. His time was then dedicated to filling in all the knowledge gaps he had when it came to architecture and design by learning construction techniques, studying psychology to better understand how people think and experience space, reading architecture history and theory, and writing to further explore what he was learning. The most beneficial discipline during this time was experimenting with modeling just for the sake of making. New forms and compositions emerged that he wasn’t previously capable of creating. He began testing materials and the construction techniques he was learning and then figuring out more effective ways of building.

During that time he was solicited multiple times with work. Simple projects, all of which he refused because they didn’t interest him enough. He knew he had to eventually take on work again, but he held out with the belief that the right project would soon come along.

Aldo was fortunate to get by without much more than a broken foot, some cuts and bruises, and a minor concussion. Sheila had a fractured femur, four broken ribs, internal bleeding, and head trauma. She had bled out significantly when waiting for the paramedics. The EMTs that were first to arrive at the scene later told Aldo that Sheila was lucky to be alive with the injuries she sustained, but Aldo felt that the jury was still out on Sheila’s luck.

Since undergoing a number of operations, she remained comatose in the hospital. The doctors held a positive outlook upon her arrival, expecting a recovery, but as the weeks went by and she remained in that catatonic state, the doctor’s hopes, along with Aldo’s, steadily declined. Aldo stayed by her side in the hospital for more than three months, sleeping there nearly every night. Over time the flowers and cards and visitors slowly faded until there weren’t any other surprises, just the repetitive beeping of the hospital. Doctor’s told Aldo with 98% certainty, that if she were to wake up someday, she would need to be kept on life support and she would only exist in a vegetative state.

Tortured by the dilemma set before him, Aldo wrestled for months with what to do. Part of him, deep down, clung to the belief that she would return, that a miracle could happen and Sheila, the Sheila he knew and remembered not this shell in the hospital, would return to his life and everything would be okay again. The truth, and what he understood, though he hated the truth of it, was that Sheila was gone and had been gone for sometime now. Only her body lived on, kept alive by life support and other than her basic bodily functions, no life remained to be supported.

Aldo carefully consulted lawyers, friends, other medical professionals and Sheila’s sister, the last living member of her family, and ultimately concluded that the only logical decision, and the humane decision at this point, would be to end it. After over a year of supporting her, he said goodbye to the love of his life and watched as she drifted from this world with the flick of a switch.

• 

• 

After the memorial, Sheila handled the usual things that come with the passing of a family member. Through talks with her father’s lawyer she found that she would inherit the lion’s share of her father’s estate. Her father wasn’t overly wealthy, but he did own a number of properties across the country. Of these properties was a vacation rental on a lake, not far from where Aldo and Sheila lived. She hadn’t seen any of these properties before, except for her father’s home, and hardly knew anything about them. Being the new owner of all that real estate, she took it on herself to visit each one and take stock of what they now owned, though fate would hold she would only get to see one of these properties.

On a cloudy Autumn day, Aldo and Sheila made the trip out to the lake house. Both of them immediately fell in love with the setting. Accustomed to life in the city, they had forgotten how rejuvenating it felt to reconnect with nature and escape from the pace they knew. The better part of a wekk was spent at the lake with them walking and exploring the 40 acre lot, going through her father’s things, and dipping in the frigid lake. Over that week, they resolved to keep the lake property for their own use.

On the drive home, six months to the day after her father’s death, tragedy struck once again. A few miles outside the city, an SUV ran a stop sign on the highway, clipping the back of their car, sending Aldo and Sheila spinning and rolling off the highway to finally rest in a shallow ditch. The culprit SUV managed to speed away, without stopping to check on the two, unconscious and suspended by their seatbelts, upside down in a muddy ditch.

They made the trip to Spain, though it lasted a whole three days. When they were in Madrid, Sheila, Aldo’s wife, received a message from an unknown caller that sounded urgent. When she returned the call, the voice on the other line informed her that her father had passed away. An electrical fire broke out at the assisted living facility where he lived. The voice tried to reassure her that he went peacefully and he was asleep wen the fire overtook his room, though she hardly heard these words and if she did she wouldn’t have believed them.

After receiving the news they immediately packed their bags and went to the airport to reschedule a return flight home. Sheila only had one sibling, which she considered all but useless when it came to family affairs. She knew she would need to be home as quickly as possibly to hand the funeral arrangements.

The memorial service was much like any other. A small, intimate group came to share their love and memories of Sheila’s father and to offer her their support and prayers. The only real memory Aldo holds from that day is the urn. When the crowd had cleared he walked up to that glossy ceramic container and slowly lifted its lid. He stared at the contents, that off-white powder that could be mistaken for portland cement. He was struck by how a life force, a very being can suddenly come to a halt and all that remains is a hand full of fine dust. Slowly he placed the lid back on the urn and his mind flitted back to memories of reading Adolf Loos’ essay on the urn and the chamber pot, and he felt uneasy with the fact that the leftovers of a human would be stored in either of these.

You see, he wasn’t always a celebrated designer. Aldo wasn’t always gifted with the eye for the near perfect olution. In the early years of his practice he struggled to get by. He found it difficiult to hold onto clients. Projects that were completed never seemed to get built in the way he had conceived them. His work failed to get recognized by publications time and time again. He was bitter rowards the design world back then, agains the whole world in general really, and it showed in his work. Slowly but surely his pipe line dried up and he was left sitting in his empty office with the phone remaining silent and no visitors popping in. He knew hee needed to do something, so he made up his mind to close up shop for a few months and to travel.

He wanted to go to Spain, he thought. Visit the Sagrada Familia, the Guggenheim, works by Calatrava, buildings by Niemeyer, the Alhambra, and the Caixa Forum. He’d go to Madrid, to Seville, to Pamplona, and Barcelona.

He was able to convince his wife to take time off from her work. She knew he had always wanted to go to Spain, of course, she did as well, and she could see how much he needed to step away from everything, how a trip abroad could do him a lot of good. Maybe it would be the reset button he needed, she thought. She was always this way, supportive, kind and caring, and willing to sacrifice anything for Aldo.