Dirt, and a poem

I’ve been wondering why it is that dirt smells to me like home, like memory, even though I grew up in the suburbs of Vancouver and we didn’t really grow food. (Except for the prodigal plum tree by the swimming pool in the backyard.)

This year our household has the opportunity to help with our neighbour’s big food garden in return for all the veggies we can eat, basically. We have grown herbs and such in pots on the back porch, but as renters we currently don’t have any ground to garden in. So this huge deer-fenced garden right across the road, complete with heated germination chambers and a greenhouse, feels like heaven. We’ve already been working since February, there are already rows and rows of delicious greens to eat, and the peas / tomato plants / garlic / broccoli plants are getting so big. It’s very exciting.

This morning I was planting out rows of lettuce, chard, and spinach from the little pots we had started them from seed in, and the smell of the dirt gave me such a strong memory connotation it kind of stopped me in my planting tracks. I couldn’t place it, though; it wasn’t ‘Oh, this is the smell of home because of eating carrots straight from the ground in our yard’ or anything specific like that. So I wondered. Is it because despite growing up in the suburbs, we did still have yards, we did play outside a lot as kids (this was pre-internet of course), we went on summer trips to our second cousin’s farm in Alberta, there were parks to play in, there was Alouette Lake to camp at? Or is it (also?) some kind of generational memory, a deep knowing that this smell is where nourishment comes from, where sustenance grows, that this is the future?

Seeds are the future, of course they are; they hold the future in a very literal way. And: we need good healthy dirt to plant them in, too.

It reminded me of a poem I wrote several years ago, so here you go:

Gardening in January

There was frost, at dawn, and the air wasn’t sure

if it was misty or clear.

But after a while I went out anyway

to dig and to clip.

Oh old dry shoots of orach and mugwort, sage and self-heal, you are brittle

and hollow;

and as always, the blackberries assume control

of all.

But let us let go

go underground, you and I, and emerge

in a few months

with more ease, and secure in the knowledge that

the dirt is home.