I Celebrate Myself and Sing Myself In Dirt

          This is one I wrote a couple of years ago, just when I was beginning to make a sort of religion of dirt and, coincidentally, the first year my brother Frank started getting into gardening at all.  I was regrettably dismissive of his maiden efforts; but in fact he took to it with a convert’s zeal and grew some mighty tomatoes, naming each of his plants and ministering to their needs like Clara Barton.  One type he grew was the heirloom Black Krim, and I saved the seeds of one he gave me and from that had a plant in my next year’s garden, which I expect made it doubly an heirloom.  I named the plant Frank and used to go down to the garden and insult it in the afternoons when I got bored writing.      

I Celebrate Myself and Sing Myself in Dirt

By Robin Ford Wallace

“What is the grass?”

Yes, Dear Reader, we are quoting Walt Whitman today.  We cannot mow our lawn without thinking of “Leaves of Grass,” in which Walt purports to be present in every blade, a concept that makes us pause behind our Troy-Bilt from time to time, examining the bottoms of our shoes contemplatively.

“Tenderly will I use you, curling grass,” he wrote and frankly, we do no such thing.  In summer our little acre is a jungle and to survive we go into commando mode. Put us behind the mower and we commence to cuss, drink beer and burn villages.   It is the way of the world, and not our fault.  This ain’t our war.

But grass is our enemy, and as we sweat and spit and ravage the countryside, we wonder why, in celebrating the wonder of life, dear Walt chose to stop at lawn level and not go that essential step deeper, asking:

What is the dirt?

As the reader may intuit, we dislike grass, whereas we have doted on dirt since our mud pie days and continue in our maturity to wallow in it happily, finding in dirt our milieu both as gardener and journalist.

But dirt gets little respect from others.   Consider the language:  Unscrupulous behavior is referred to as “playing dirty,” and if you engage in it you will “soil” your reputation, causing people to say that you have “feet of clay.”  Dirt, with water, is the base of the food chain and thus feeds the planet, but do people appreciate it?  No!  They “treat it like dirt.” 

How did this come about?  Perhaps it is because there is so much of it.  It is “as common as dirt.” 

Or perhaps it is the fact that ours is a nation that wishes to forget its agricultural past.  To the pavement-treading urbanite, dirt is something that the despised older generation with its baggy clothes and bad grammar slouched toothlessly around in, on equal terms with the hogs.   

But the supreme irony is that when such people become interested in the now trendy subject of organic gardening, they go out and spend serious money on sacks of – guess what?  The stuff that comes from the store must be this miraculous substance they’ve read so much about, whereas the stuff they wipe off their Guccis is just dirt.

And when we say “such people,” we are, of course, referring to our brother Frank.  This spring, Frank for the first time was bitten by the gardening bug.  Knowing nothing about gardening, and quite a lot about building upscale hotels, Frank began his maiden voyage into horticulture by constructing a luxury condo for his plants in the back yard of his primary girlfriend’s house. 

The gleaming wooden structure that contained Frank’s tiny raised bed, with a bottom to prevent weeds, tall sides to retard erosion and a top beam to support hanging baskets, bore glowing witness to his carpentry skills; though the precisely ruled nine inches he had allowed between tomato plants was equally eloquent testimony to a somewhat less perfect grasp of agriculture.  And of course Frank then spent $300 to fill his Tomato Hilton with store-bought soil. 

When we suggested, gently, that Frank’s tomatoes might fare better out in the yard, with more room between them, he was incredulous.  The yard was “just dirt.”

“Just dirt” indeed!  Dirt is an amazing substance.  It takes thousands of years to make dirt when conditions are perfect, and in some places it never forms at all.

Dirt starts when wind and water slowly, slowly chip away at rock, breaking it down into smaller particles.  That is the beginning, but before dirt can support life, air has to mix minerals into it, plants and animals have to decay in it, and worms have to digest it for generations. 

Then dirt starts moving around.  Dirt is always on the go.  If it is carried by water and deposited somewhere, it is called alluvium; if by a glacier, till; if by wind, loess

There are lots of different textures of dirt, with sand one of the coarser and clay one of the finer.  In our area we have a lot of clay, and it is true that clay is not a perfect dirt.  Its tiny particles bind together tightly, preventing air from reaching plant roots, and making for dense clods when wet and a hoe-breaking hardness when dry. 

But you go into gardening with the dirt you’ve got, and in any case, as has been said about other things, when dirt is good it’s fantastic and when it’s bad it’s still pretty good.  Clay has plenty of nutrients, and mixing in rotting organic material, called humus in dirt lingo, not only adds more but also corrects the gloppy texture. 

So you don’t need plant food, you don’t need $300, and you certainly don’t need a Tomato Hilton.  Because of the miracle of dirt, if you have raw red clay, and a thick layer of spoiled hay, you have pretty much all you need to grow anything you like.

Unlike poor Frank.  Frank’s primary girlfriend found out about his secondary and tertiary girlfriends, so baldly this time as to compromise her willing suspension of disbelief beyond even Frank’s prodigious fiction skills, and she tossed him out, thus separating him from his pretty garden.

But don’t mourn for him, Gentle Reader.  The tomatoes were planted too closely to come to anything, and the romantic upheaval is something that happens to Frank at least once a year, reliably supplying the family with conversational fodder for Thanksgiving.

It  is what we treasure about him.  As mentioned above, there is nothing we celebrate as much as:

Dirt.

END

            Robin Ford Wallace lives in Deerhead Cove, where she plays quietly in the dirt, disturbing no one.