Concrete

​BOOKS BY PATTI LISZKAY
​AVAILABLE ON AMAZON

​"Equal and Opposite Reactions" http://amzn.to/2xvcgRa
and the sequel, "Hail Mary" https://www.amzn.com/1684334888
​Available on Amazon.

​CONCRETE

     Over the summer while our daughter, son-in-law and grandchildren were visiting us from Los Angeles,

 …Tom recruited our son-in-law to help with some heavy-duty projects around the yard and house, 

…including an area of cracked concrete in our garage.
         The men used a concrete saw to cut out the broken patch of floor.

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…then they hauled the chunks of concrete into a pile outside the garage. 

​    This was by no means a huge pile of concrete; when it was removed the hole it left was an irregular quadrilateral, about  five feet long on one side, maybe six on the other, by two, two-and-a-half feet wide on either end, with another little rectangular area at the top. The hole was about four inches deep, more of less.

       And yet the relatively small amount of concrete that had filled that relatively small hole looked so heavy to me lying there in in a pile in my front yard. I doubted I could easily lift even the smallest chunk.
       I asked Tom how much that pile of concrete weighed. “Just about half a ton,” he said.
       “Half a ton?” I said. “That little pile of concrete weighs a thousand pounds?”
       "Probably close to it,” said Tom. “Concrete is heavy stuff.”
​       Incredulous, I did the math:
    To refill the hole they would use thirteen sixty-pound bags of concrete, plus twenty-six gallons of water with which to mix it. One gallon of water weighs 8.34 pounds. Altogether that’s 996.84 pounds. Just about half a ton.

      This morning I found myself thinking about the little pile of a half a ton of concrete that was in my yard. And I wondered how many tons of concrete lay on the ground on that day twenty years ago after the world came crashing down.