My grandfather's hands were the first thing I noticed about the craft — cracked, grey, and steady as a level. He said the stone dust works into the cracks and stays there, a little of the quarry in every mason.

Callus, then memory

You don't learn stone with your head. You learn it with the grip that knows how hard to strike, the wrist that keeps the chisel at forty degrees without thinking. The hands remember what the mind never wrote down.

What the hands keep

Thirty years in, mine look like his now. The dust doesn't wash out, and I've stopped trying. It's a ledger of every block I've cut — and, I hope, a map for whoever holds the chisel next.