I have had my hands in the soil as of late. Two Fridays ago, I planted a viburnum bush, three chrysanthemums and a yellow poplar, not because it happened to be Earth Day, but because it was sunny and warm, and I had the whole afternoon to myself. The dirt I scraped out of and back into the shallow holes I dug near a backyard picket fence smelled good, and when dampened with a few sprinkles of water, it soon found its way into the deep wrinkles of my knuckles and under my fingernails. For the most part, I have nothing but good things to say about dirt.
There is a distinction between the two words — soil and dirt — even though we use them interchangeably. Soil, it is said, lies under our feet, while dirt is the stuff that accumulates on unwashed hands and gets swept under rugs. For variety’s sake, I will use both terms here.
The farmers have been hard at it lately, so dirt is very much on the minds of country people like us. I have seen silty clouds of it off in the distance as it is kicked up by the chisel plows and discs, and even though its scent is one I don’t get as often as I used to now that so many farmers have gone to no-till planting, I caught a whiff of it in the air a time or two last week. It may sound Whitmanesque of me, but I breathed in those moments, and it kind of made me glad to be alive.
The soil around my place is mostly hard clay, although I strike a vein of good loam every so often. Rather than dig in it, I have come to know much of my dirt a chip or clod at a time.
Perhaps the hardest adjustment I had to make when I left my childhood home to live with a wife and a mortgage and an even smaller bathroom than the one we had as kids, was coming to terms with our soil. I grew up with earth so sandy and fine, and apparently rich, that transplanting a tree or hoeing a furrow for green beans or sweet corn rarely raised a sweat. I remember digging holes in our yard for my mom’s rose bushes and working in my Grandpa Roy’s garden, and always the soil there had a sweetness to it, a musky, pleasantness that sat in my nostrils like childhood memories now do in my head. I could have scooped a hole in that dirt with just my hands, but here at home, digging means jumping on a shovel as if it were a pogo stick. I often bank unkind words for any digging project I have to tackle.
Ironically, one of the first big jobs I had when I moved here was to replace the drains in the house. In our first winter, every elbow and trap — every inch of our drainpipes — froze as solid as stone, so I made sure when the springtime thaw came, I started at our sinks and washer and went east with new lines. Since I was keenly aware of my own poverty, I didn’t hire any of the digging done, but rather grabbed an old tile spade and a shovel and a pickaxe and eagerly attacked my back yard; I think my brother-in-law, Bob, came to help me, too. I soon learned the suffering that the Chinese and Irish immigrants who worked on the transcontinental railroad must have endured.
We had three large, old maples behind our house, and they all must have despised me, for their roots grew through every inch of the route that led me away from the house and across a fence into a pasture. To complicate matters, the house’s previous owners had horses who had packed the yellow clay into something resembling a tarmac. I labored mighty and hard, and I felt that had my grandfather been alive, I would have been able to commiserate with his ditch-digging days in the WPA. Why, even moles came away with bruised snouts when they dared to dig in that area.
“I dug every inch for those drains by hand,” I plan to tell my grandchildren someday as we survey the property and as I describe to them my miseries and sacrifices…
I spoke of no-till farming a moment ago. It has become necessary because topsoil — that stuff we carry in the treads of our boots and the crevices of our work gloves — is only about a foot or so deep, and it tends to wash and blow away. Topsoil is where most of the growing action takes place on this planet, where plants and animals co-exist, growing and dying and replenishing. Discovery Education tells me there are more living things in a shovelful of decent soil than there are people living on the planet.
After that top layer, we find sub-soil, the stratum of dirt that contains most of the earth’s minerals and water; plants point their roots downward for a reason, you know. After that comes a layer of weathered or decomposed rock, and after that, a layer of bedrock that reaches nearly to the earth’s core. It was to that depth that my brother, John, and I must have been trying to reach when we were kids. Behind our house, and under a huge red oak, we had an eroded hillside that came to be known as “The Sand Pile.” It was there that we dug trenches for our plastic soldiers, foxholes from which we dealt with slimy Nazis, and roads for the old metal semi-trucks we borrowed from our cousins. We eventually constructed a dugout that featured a rusting tin roof, a manhole-type door, and secret observation windows to keep a lookout for anyone daring to come our way. It is truly a wonder neither of us died in a cave-in, or struck water, whichever came first.
These days, it is called “work” when I dig in the soil, but it is now, most often, a job that I enjoy, for instead of being tied to a desk in dress shirt and shoes, I am in my jeans and boots, and I am planting something that in all probability will outlive me. This weekend, it will be an ash tree that I stumbled across in my woods last fall.
It has been said that science knows less about what goes on in the dirt under our own feet than we do about the far reaches of deep space. I guess that’s true because we’ve always been taught to keep our heads up, rather than down. It’s not a bad thing to get our hands dirty every once in a while, though.
Mike Lunsford can be reached by email at hickory913@aol.com, or c/o the Tribune-Star at P.O. Box 149, Terre Haute, IN 47808. Visit his website at www.mikelunsford.com for information about book signings and speaking opportunities.
Mike Lunsford
MIKE LUNSFORD: It’s time for us to get the real lowdown on dirt…
- Mike Lunsford
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A walk in the woods
I went for a walk in the woods one day last week after work. It was a warm and green afternoon, and a fresh blue breeze blew in from the west like a new spring friend.
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MIKE LUNSFORD: ‘Dowsers’ provide hope more than science
My grandfather was a man of God. Many times I saw him, his right hand held high in the air at his Wednesday night “prayer meeting,” praising the Lord before weeping at the altar on his knees. And yet, he was a “dowser,” a “diviner,” a “witcher” who, as a favor, would grab a forked sassafras stick and find water for some poor unfortunate whose well had gone dry.
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MIKE LUNSFORD: As of today, it’s unofficially spring
Despite the calendar telling us not to rush things, I think it is all right to go ahead and say spring is here. The Ides of March has passed, Easter is coming soon, and I have already been out in my yard with a rake, getting my boots muddy. It looks like spring to me.
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MIKE LUNSFORD: Twain’s Sawyer helps us yearn for ‘wilderness of childhood’
My cousin, Roger, stopped in one day last summer for a glass of tea and a little conversation. Rog has lived an hour’s drive away for years and now, and besides summer reunions, I don’t see him nearly often enough. He’s a good man who has raised a good family, and he owns a healthy sense of appreciation for not only the life he has now, but also the lives we had years ago as kids.
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MIKE LUNSFORD: Cheerful green of wheat fights winter blahs
There is a light drizzle of freezing rain tapping at the door of my cabin today. It is little more than a week before the words I am writing are due to appear on your breakfast table or work desk with your morning coffee and scrambled eggs. But I write when I can, and today, despite a full schedule of televised football games, and the stacks of ungraded papers in my briefcase, and a good book lying open on my nightstand, I am clacking away on a keyboard to the whir of a heater and the steady drip of my gutters.
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MIKE LUNSFORD: On the simple joys of watching it snow ...
It began to snow about 20 minutes ago, as I write this, light, wind-driven flakes that fall silently into my woods as I watch from a window.
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MIKE LUNSFORD: On this day above all, ‘Peace on earth, good will to men’
More than a year after his wife’s death, the great American poet, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, wrote in his diary on Christmas Day.
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MIKE LUNSFORD: Remembering a Lefty Frizzell-kind of Christmas ...
My brother and sister and I sat around a Thanksgiving dinner table a month ago, shifting in our seats just enough to make our yet-to-be digested turkey sit a little more easily, and, as we often do when we get together, we reminisced about our childhoods for a while.
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MIKE LUNSFORD: The wonders of wading in ‘The Iridescence of a Shallow Stream’
I have no idea how many times I have written a story that begins with the wistful phrase, “When I was a boy. ...”
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MIKE LUNSFORD: Little man who came to dinner changes feel of household
My 7-year-old nephew, Carson, came to visit us last week. That in itself isn’t earth-shattering news, for he often drops by with one of his parents or the other, the last time dressed as a ghoul for Halloween. But for a couple like Joanie and me, whose youngest child is now nearly two decades past Carson’s age, having a little guy like him in the house, even for a few hours, takes a bit of adjusting.
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MIKE LUNSFORD: Reflections: a bit of red glass and our daily thanksgivings
I sat in the half-light of my old desk lamp a few nights ago, a chilly wind blowing in from the northwest that made me appreciative of my long-sleeved shirt and purring heater.
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MIKE LUNSFORD: Growing up — and ‘old’ — with many mouths to feed
At our family reunion last summer, I asked my brother if I could borrow a pair of photo albums he had put together. Over the past couple of years, I have committed quite a few of our family’s old yellowing snapshots to newly cropped and digitalized lives, and I wanted to do the same with some of the pictures John has collected for himself.
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MIKE LUNSFORD: Violets in October – a pleasant surprise
I guess I don’t pay much attention to the weather forecasts these days because it surprised me a bit when our furnace kicked on a few nights ago.
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MIKE LUNSFORD: A library is a good thing — even a little, homegrown one
I grew up with libraries, and I can’t imagine there ever being a time when I won’t want to wander one exploring it like some bookworm-Balboa, finding an author or title that I never really knew existed before. Creating those “Eureka” moments seems to be a dying interest now that so many of us download and digest books electronically without ever really considering that there just might be some hidden gem we’d have liked even more had we simply stumbled upon it on a shelf by accident. I think those moments of discovery are not unlike kicking up lost treasure a mile from where X marks the spot.
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MIKE LUNSFORD: The ‘soothsayer’ who came to dinner
I’ve had a good time opening my mail these past few weeks. Sure, I still received the usual junk about lower credit card rates and satellite television packages, but the genuine letters made me smile; most were about a story I wrote in late August.
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MIKE LUNSFORD: The agony of de‘feet’ has this writer on his heels
I don’t know if I can electrocute myself by using a computer and soaking my feet in a pan of warm water at the same time, but I am contemplating taking the risk. My feet, particularly the right foot, have staged a 10-digit rebellion over the past few months. After a half-century of commendable service, my pods are screaming to be taken in for repairs, a big inconvenience for a guy who works on his feet all day and whose “sole” form of serious exercise is putting one foot in front of another walking the local roadways.
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Mike Lunsford: Summer’s hidden beauty worth the wait
The great naturalist John Burroughs once said that nature teaches more than she preaches. I can’t recall a summer where that rings true more than this one, for that old sun of ours truly taught us a thing or two these past three months.
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MIKE LUNSFORD: It’s time to redefine the concept of ‘assisted living’
Although it has been nearly two months now, I can’t forget the few afternoon hours I spent on a hot June day this summer at a local “assisted living” facility in town. I had been asked to speak to a group of men there about Father’s Day, but for most part, the wonderful old guys who came to listen certainly made my day more memorable than I did theirs.
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MIKE LUNSFORD: Observations on smooth stones and blue-green water…
It was raining when I began to write this. Although no one could rightfully call what we got this afternoon a “downpour,” it was nice to have my windows open to hear the steady drops of a passing shower tapping on my dry-as-dust deck and hard-as-concrete yard.
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MIKE LUNSFORD: This summer has us recalling the heat of ’36
It was “only” 99 degrees one afternoon last week when I decided to work on a backyard deck. With a jack and a drill and a little more sweat than I wanted to invest in the project, I went about the business of leveling its sags and dips a bit. The sun pounded down on my head and shoulders like a thug’s blackjack, but as I packed my tools and drank a glass of cool water under a big maple tree a few hours later, I couldn’t help but think about how lucky I’ve been these past few dusty and drought-stricken weeks. I have worked under this summer’s heat lamp for only a few hours at a time, but God help the roofers and utility linesmen and firemen, and so many others, who are out in it day after long hot day.
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MIKE LUNSFORD: We had no better friend than Andy Taylor
The world is a sadder place now that Andy Griffith has died, but at least we still have Andy Taylor.
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MIKE LUNSFORD: Wading deeper into the subject of Blue Herons
Like a relative who has worn out his welcome, the hot, parched weather of this young summer has already overstayed its visit with us, so my wife and I have found ourselves walking our road later in the evenings to keep our feet cool and our backs dry.
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MIKE LUNSFORD: Thanking two dads whose gifts have never stopped coming…
It is nearly a week until Father’s Day, but I have had my dad, and my father-in-law — a second dad to me — on my mind today. I wrote about both men just a few weeks ago, but I have set my mind to write about them again anyway. I don’t want this story to be sad; they both loved to laugh and wouldn’t want that. No, I just wanted to tell them hello, and to thank them again for what they still do for me.
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MIKE LUNSFORD: Raising a flag for my father, veteran or not
My daughter, Ellen, and I stood at my parents’ graves on Mother’s Day a few weeks back and talked about how it couldn’t possibly have been so long since we lost them. My dad, for instance, has been gone for 16 years, and that is nearly unimaginable
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MIKE LUNSFORD: Time to become one of the boys of summer again …
Besides writing for a living, I teach school, and I’m not ashamed to tell people that I still love my classroom. I’ve been a teacher for 33 years, all of them in the same school district, and virtually all of them in the same building. But I also have to tell you that if the next few weeks don’t slide by pretty quickly, I may just let loose of the last thread of sanity from which I have been dangling for a while now. There are a lot of teachers out there who feel the same way.
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MIKE LUNSFORD: It’s time for us to get the real lowdown on dirt…
I have had my hands in the soil as of late. Two Fridays ago, I planted a viburnum bush, three chrysanthemums and a yellow poplar, not because it happened to be Earth Day, but because it was sunny and warm, and I had the whole afternoon to myself. The dirt I scraped out of and back into the shallow holes I dug near a backyard picket fence smelled good, and when dampened with a few sprinkles of water, it soon found its way into the deep wrinkles of my knuckles and under my fingernails. For the most part, I have nothing but good things to say about dirt.
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MIKE LUNSFORD: Make big money: Raise worms at home for fun and profit…
When I think about all of the crazy things my brother and sister and I did just to make a few dollars when we were kids, I can’t help but feel a little sorry for teens this summer as they try to find jobs in what is supposed to be a very tight market. Money, to say the least, was a rare commodity when we were growing up, but you have to at least give us credit for trying.
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MIKE LUNSFORD: ‘When lilacs last in the dooryard bloom’d…’
Had white lace curtains been hanging in the west window of my cabin, I would have had a perfect Wyeth painting to watch last Thursday. A gentle breeze was wafting through my screens, and the sunlight of a warm late March day was fractured by the window sill as it poured onto my legs and feet. I could catch the scent of lilacs as it was carried in by that wind, and it and the subtle melody of the chimes that hang just outside made me as lazy as an old cat.
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MIKE LUNSFORD: A report from the country as a new season brings sense of renewal
Regardless of what the calendar may yet say, spring has happened. It couldn’t have come too soon, and it wasn’t just last week and its windy 70s that have convinced me. I have been keeping a journal of sorts in my head for a fortnight now, stashing away reports of birds and buds and sounds in the crammed cabinets of my mind, all in a file marked, “The New Season.”
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MIKE LUNSFORD: Feeding time at the homestead draws a host of new guests
I stepped outside into the warmth of an unusually mild early March morning last week to do what I always do just before I grab my briefcase and book bag and lunch bag and head off to work. It’s nearly always dark when I leave, even as the sun gets up earlier and earlier in the late winter, so I often go about the business of feeding our cats with porch lights on and a flashlight in hand.
- More Mike Lunsford Headlines
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Raw: Trucker Bumps I-5 Bridge Before Collapse
Suspect in Killing of Officer Found Dead in Cell
Raw: Texas Deputy Shot by Colo. Suspect Honored
Major Detours Following Wash. Bridge Collapse
American Held in Grisly Czech Murders
Raw: Jersey Shore Reopens for Summer
High Wire Spectacle Thrills Crowd in Austria
Today in History May 25
Officials: Tsarnaev Friend Linked to Slaying
Britain Braces for Possible Copycat Attacks
UK-bound Pakistan Plane Diverted, 2 Men Arrested
Bus Fire Kills 16 Children, Teacher in Pakistan
Raw Video: Washington State Bridge Collapse
Obama:Sexual Assault Threatens Trust in Military
Today in History May 24
ShowBiz Minute: Shelton, King, Lopez
Raw: Gay Rights Activists March in Ukraine
Johnson: Don't Blame Islam or UK Policy
Raw: Pakistan Election Results Protested
ShowBiz Minute: Pickler, Franklin, Potter
Raw: Apple 1 Computer Sells for More Than $650k
Young protestor goes viral on Youtube
Toronto Mayor says he's not a crack head
Maine island offers lighthouse getaway
Should We Prepare for Quakes?
Lynn Kindergarten Class Rescues Ducklings
Congressional gold medal awarded to civil rights heroes
Charles Ramsey visits Kentucky
Unique Display Greets Guests At Revel Casino
Cape Cod Train Service Worries Residents
BASE jumper rides snowmobile off cliff to honor dead friend
Bridge Collapse Survivor: 'Rough Day'
SHOCKING: School Guard Throws Girl Down Stairs
Star Wars X-Wing Star Fighter Made of Legos
Actress Amanda Bynes Arrested in New York
Singer Psy Has An Imposter
President Obama Heckled at National Security Speech
Morgan Freeman falls asleep on air
