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.
News Columns
MIKE LUNSFORD: It’s time for us to get the real lowdown on dirt…
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MIKE LUNSFORD: Remembering Mom a day after Mother’s Day
I don’t think there has been a day in the last eight years that I haven’t thought of my mom. Being all grown up with wrinkles to call my own doesn’t make me miss my parents any less.
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MARK BENNETT: After running for 28 hours straight, what’s another 5 miles?
Some phrases can only be uttered by a few people, or none at all.
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MARK BENNETT: Glitches show limitations of high-stakes testing concept
The dog ate my homework. That age-old excuse — based on a shockingly unforeseen complication — rarely works for a kid who didn’t finish yesterday’s math assignment. Yet, in a role reversal, Indiana school children, along with their teachers and administrators, are left to accept an explanation for a disruption best described as the mother of all ironies.
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MARK BENNETT: One step at a time to save lives
Joan Brown.
Remember that name. -
MARK BENNETT: Sometimes, the mere posing of questions is significant
The era seems quaint now, almost like a fable. When people left their house doors unlocked. When the sight of a police officer in a school meant it was Career Day.
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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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MARK BENNETT: New reality steers Nashville singer to Crossroads for Historical Society concert
People pass through the Crossroads of America for lots of reasons.
Business trips. College campus events. Federal prison sentences. Visits with relatives. Gas pitstops.
Or maybe a career change and a twist of fate.
Ty Brown makes his first stop in downtown Terre Haute as the headliner of a multi-band Sweet Sensations Country Jam concert May 4 in the Ohio Building — a fundraiser for the Vigo County Historical Society. -
HAYDEN: 9-year-old lobbyist weighs in on school safety
Senate Bill 1 shot to the forefront last week, after it was amended by the House education committee with a provision that mandates every public school in Indiana would be required to have someone on staff armed with a loaded gun during school hours.
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HAYDEN: Republican shift proving to be real
When a federal judge struck down key provisions of the state’s immigration law last week, it seemed anticlimactic.
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LUNSFORD: A different kind of resurrection story, no foolin’
If you’ve had pets in your family long enough, it’s likely that you’ll see a miracle or two — a dog that couldn’t possibly have lived, but did; a cat that grew to 20 pounds after being born the runt of the litter; a goldfish that had been belly-up too many times to believe it could have survived another day.
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STATE OF THE STATEHOUSE: Americans of Hispanic heritage becoming active in Republican party
When Republicans in the Indiana General Assembly decided earlier this year to put off a vote on locking the state’s same-sex marriage ban into the state constitution, it sent a signal that GOP leaders were evolving on the issue of marriage equality.
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MARK BENNETT: Terre Haute barber ‘sharpens up’ customers for 50 years
People streamed through this section of downtown Terre Haute in those days.
“You could hardly walk by here,” John Hochhalter said, pointing toward the sidewalk outside the window.
The bustle has faded since the early 1960s. Hochhalter remains. He’s still barbering in the same shop he and late business partner Kenny Thomas opened a half-century ago this week. -
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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Americans for Prosperity aim to browbeat GOP lawmakers
If you're outside the Indianapolis TV market, you may not have seen yet the Americans for Prosperity ad that demonizes the House Republicans for resisting Republican Gov. Mike Pence's tax cut plan.
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MAUREEN HAYDEN: Pence may find himself in a mess if he gets what he wants
Here’s a story to consider: A Republican governor with ties to the tea party and possible presidential ambitions decides he wants to slash the state’s income tax rate, but meets with massive resistance from legislative leaders from his own party.
Sounds like the scenario playing out in the Indiana Statehouse, right? -
MARK BENNETT: Reflections of grid success stir with Brent Anderson’s passing
A few hundred miles away, and nearly 40 years gone by, a special game ball still occupies a fond place in Rudy Bohinc’s memories.
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MIKE LUNSFORD: If handwriting is a window to my soul, I’m glad this is typewritten…
Somewhere in the mess I call my “archives,” I have most of my grade school report cards hidden away. I have kept them under wraps, because I want to be long gone when my children — or grandchildren — unearth them and discover that their self-righteous teacher of a dad was, in fact, a terrible student in his formative years.
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MAUREEN HAYDEN: Are legislators gambling with the future of gaming?
Indiana lawmakers have been debating whether to give the state’s casinos more financial incentives to compete with the shiny new gambling palaces popping up in Ohio.
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MARK BENNETT: Never truer: Knowledge vital to narrowing ‘skills gap’
The pillar at the gates of Faber College in the movie “Animal House” bore a wise motto, despite its tongue-in-cheek intent …
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STATE OF THE STATEHOUSE: Pot decriminalization bill dead, but reduced-punishment aspect still alive
In the flurry of activity at the Statehouse in recent weeks, I missed reporting some sad news for stoners: The legislation to decriminalize marijuana is dead.
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MARK BENNETT: Great-niece to re-enact Paul Dresser’s musical legacy in Terre Haute show
People can be forgotten. Their lives end, time passes and memories fade.
Often, the only keepers of their legacies are family and friends, who tell and retell their stories, generation to generation.
For Paul Dresser, his fame burned strong enough as a turn-of-the-century, million-seller songwriter to preserve bits of his public notoriety. -
MIKE LUNSFORD: The ‘lovely gift’ of a beech tree …
This is not the season that I usually write of trees, for besides a few pin oaks that hang on to the most stubborn of leaves, my woods stand bare and dormant and cold right now. My trees are patiently awaiting the green of spring that I feel, for some reason, is to arrive a little earlier this year than is usual.
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STATE OF THE STATEHOUSE: What to do with that $2 billion sitting around
We Hoosiers like to think of ourselves as special, but when it comes to the current debate in the Indiana Statehouse over the budget, we’re a lot like other states: Grappling with some post-recession questions about how to balance spending and taxes.
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MARK BENNETT: An Olympic takedown
Imagine an iconic image of American sports history erased.
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STATE OF THE STATEHOUSE: Pence sticks to his ‘Roadmap’
As a U.S. congressman, Mike Pence made it perfectly clear how he felt about the need for a constitutional amendment to ban same-sex marriage.
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MARK BENNETT: Indiana’s ‘skills gap’
A problem lasting decades ceases to be a “problem.” By then, the situation becomes “part of the culture.”
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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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STATE OF THE STATEHOUSE:Supreme Court providing convenient cover for GOP
If GOP leaders in the Indiana General Assembly announce this week, as expected, that they’re postponing a vote on a constitutional ban on same-sex marriages and civil unions, you can expect them to cite the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision to step into the larger issue later this year as the primary reason.
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MARK BENNETT: America’s best quality of life? Indiana must address flaws, set priorities
Just as the job interview seems smooth, the interviewer drops the question.
“So, where do you see yourself in five years?” -
MARK BENNETT: Pondering what is meant by ‘quality of life’ to Hoosiers
Sometimes it’s sincere. Other times, it’s sarcasm.
You cross paths with a friend, ask how they’re doing, and they say, “Ah, just livin’ the dream.”
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