Friday, July 09, 2004

Digging Dirt

Every night is a bath night in these wonderful, play-outside-‘til-you’re-filthy mid-summer days. After hours of messing about in the yard, my daughters bang through the screen door, hair pushed off grimy foreheads, their bodies spattered by mud and legs tatooed with sticky popsicle drips that have acquired their own distinctive crust of dirt.

I supposed I should heave a June Cleaver sigh, hands on crisply aproned hips, shaking my head with a knowing smile that says: This, too, shall pass. But, surveying my own mud-crusted self when I come in, groaning stiffly, from gardening these days, all I can say is, “Chip off the old block, girls – ain’t it grand to be dirty?”

I sometimes feel I have not properly grown up because of my abiding love of playing in the dirt. There must be other gardeners, like me, who self-consciously hide their grimy nails in meetings with real adults who somehow maintain perfect manicures. Why is dirt so charged with feelings of shame?

Of course, at its etymological roots, “dirt” is linked to excrement, so it has, at best, a checkered past. Sayings like “dirt cheap,” “dirt poor,” or “dirty tricks” don’t help dirt’s image, nor does the Biblical and late-nineteenth century linkage between cleanliness and godliness that gives dirt moralizing ties to internal filth and spiritual poverty.

But anyone who’s ever shoved a seed in the ground with a heart full of hope knows better. What could be richer, more surprising, more endlessly yielding, than dirt? And the association with manure is not a guilty association, but a fortuitous partnership. At a recent tour of Amish Acres, my daughter’s fourth grade class was first interested and then mortified when the white-haired tour guide earnestly explained the workings of a manure spreader, saying, “You know what manure is, don’t you kids? It’s poopy.” Groans. But the kids tucked gustily into the huge Amish lunch that followed, made from local produce yielded up by that same embarrassing stuff.

And that’s the miracle of dirt – riches spring forth from nothing. This year, surprising everyone but scientists, in great swaths of the U.S. the dirt suddenly spewed out millions of goggle-eyed cicadas, who, like so many other 17-year-olds, play their music way too loud, way too late into the night, and then laze around in the morning, waiting for someone else to pick up their crusty, cast-off outfits. What will the dirt spit out next?

In my early twenties, when I fell in love for good, I had just read Toni Morrison’s novel Sula, and her weirdly wonderful image of discovering another person fully from the outside in struck me as exactly right, and still does: A character imagines rubbing a chamois on her new lover’s skin to reveal gold leaf, and then filing away the gold to reveal alabaster, and then, at her beloved’s very core, finding “loam, fertile, free of pebbles and twigs” – rich soil she can lift and sift. It’s a mystery what it will yield.

As if playing out that metaphor, in our first summer together my beloved and I took on the seemingly romantic project of renting a community garden plot. Friends teased us about going out every evening to “touch the good earth,” mocking our suburban fantasies about agrarian roots. But all through that inferno of the drought of 1988 – perhaps you remember? – we hauled five-gallon jugs of water to our struggling garden from a pump across a field of hardpan that looked like a wildebeest’s back – dusty and cracked, sporting only a few hairy strands of grass that had baked white in the sun. And sure enough, with enough water and manure, even in that year of stunted corn crops, we coaxed wax beans and tomatoes out of our little plot – surprised and pleased by the flourishing of our partnership.

Many gardens later, we’ve learned to do to what organic gardeners call “improving” the dirt, by composting our kitchen trimmings into rich loam that reminds me of that soil Toni Morrison pictures at a loved one’s core – dark, sweet-smelling, and revealing endless riches. Look closely at our improved dirt and you’ll see tiny sparks of last Thanksgiving’s pistachio shells, cracked with friends and good wine, and bits of eggshell sprinkled in like stars, from custom-made birthday cakes and hurried school nights when we made do with scrambled eggs for supper. Our memories and experiences of nurturing one another go back into this dirt to yield up the next season’s perennials and basil crop that we’ll share with others in cut bouquets and pesto supper parties.

“Improving” is something you can do to something else, surely, but it almost always changes you, too. The more time I spend in the company of dirt, the more this rings true. How’s our dirt? Improving nicely, thank you. And it’s improving us, as well.

Broadcast by April Lidinsky on July 09, 2004
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