I love standing in the cool mud of late spring. Bare feet oozing into the liquefied earth, a mixture of clay, dirt, water, and rocks. Already half of the garden is planted and weeds mix themselves with the vegetable plants.
Every year, my family tends this large rectangular space of good earth. Compost and manure are stirred in as my mother tries to bend the clay and rocky earth towards better stuff. My father, and now my brother, spend hours stirring with the rototiller. My father used to say, while my sister and I picked rocks, that we should grow rocks instead of vegetables. My mother says we grow vegetables, rocks, and weeds.
When school ended, my sister and I had two things to look forward to, weeding the garden and a week long camping trip. For years it was always the same, till as we got older we added summer jobs, and summer camp to the to do list. When we were younger, my parents would hire a baby sitter for the summer. Every morning my mother would write a long chore list for my sister and I. The good babysitters helped with the chores, the bad ones sun bathed and made sure we were well sun screened while we worked.
Together, my sister whining, we would bend over the rows weeding. Our necks and arms would become drenched with sweat and our backs would bake in the heat of summer. We quickly learned several important facts about weeding. Don't pull up the good plants, make sure to get the roots of the weeds, or they will just grow back, and start weeding early in the morning before it is too hot. Although at the time, my sister and I only wanted to play and felt rather ill used by our parents, there were many great things about the garden. Peas, corn, and beans. A wonderful mix of strange and new things that as a family we would watch grow. Together we would wait for the first fresh spring peas, the yellow and green summer squash sprinkled with fresh mozzarella, and corn roasted over the red hot coals of a broken apart bonfire.
Once the food started to load our table and our freezers and shelves filled with pickles, jams, and bags of various vegetables, our minds changed. No longer was the garden something you complained about. Sure we had hated all that weeding, the bent backs and sweaty foreheads. Sure we had whinnied and found excuses. Once that food started, all seemed to be forgotten. The reason for all the work was easily apparent.
At some point every year, when its still early spring, around the time when you first plant peas, my feet start craving. While living in a city its hardly possible to walk out back and stick your feet in the ground. Yet every spring my feet beg for that muddy clay dirt. My fingers wish to be planting seeds and pulling weeds.
Ever since I moved out of my parents house and started spending summers were there was more concrete then grass and dirt, I have craved for mud and dirt. I crave the clean dirt that gets under your finger nails and stains the bottom of your feet. I crave the sweat making work of weeding in the hot summer sun. The hours spent arguing with my sister while we pulled weeds between the rows of corn. Or complained about the injustice of it all while we trudged with buckets of withering plants out to the hedgerow to dump them.
Looking back I never see how boring or hard the work was. Rather I remember the feeling of accomplishment when after finishing a row, which before was weed filled like a jungle, you look over the dark brown black earth. The feeling of the cool dirt on your bare feet and the pleasant ache as you stand and stretch after bending over for a long time. Sneaking tastes of the peas and pulling pieces of rhubarb to munch on.
When I see kids now, playing their video games, slowly turning to mush in front of the TVs and PCs, I wish I could given them my childhood. Teach them the ways of plants to tell the difference between peas and corn and squash. I want them to learn imagination and creativity at the gentle hands of nature. To feel grass and rock and dirt with bare feet. I want to give them fresh air and sun burns. Teach them the wonders of earth worms and shy blue birds.
So much of my childhood consisted of mixed things: Country life and old values, mixed with the images of the wide world coming across our one channel of TV. Mixes of modern art from my mother's college books and the art work of the sky and earth. Mixes of being poor in the eyes of my classmates, and seeing them poorer than myself. Mixes of faith and religion, of living in creation and learning the world.
Very few people in America today fully understand the feeling of bone tiring work, of growing things, and fighting with the land (or working with the land). In the city (Philadelphia, where I currently live) I see no connection. Children here don't even realize how their food is made, nor have found a connection between dirt and life. It feels so strange here, the ground feels dead, as if I have forgotten my green thumb. Things are too contained.
So I long to break through the concrete and find the good dirt. I long to stand in my bare feet and feel the mud seep between my toes. I wonder if I will ever feel completely at home in the city.
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