The soil is powder dry on top, but a few inches below I find damp dark brown dirt. So different from the sandy clay at my own home. Hopefully perfect for growing the vegetable seeds and seedlings I so carefully planted today.
A friend has loaned me her garden spot this year as my yard is too shady to grow much of anything except trees, moss and violets. Her garden is surrounded by expansive lawns and fields, ringed by hardwoods, and full of the songs of a house wren, cardinal, chestnut-sided warbler, goldfinches, and red-bellied woodpecker. They keep me company while I toil in the muted hot sun. A garter snake slithered away when I arrived. I said out loud: “oh good, I’m glad you’re here – perhaps you’ll keep the chipmunks and voles out of my garden!” A lone gray tree frog has just started to sing – such a wondrous low trill that echoes from a distant tree. My nose twitches and then I sneeze from the pollen that has collected in the dirt, blown in from the field of flowers.
My yard is nestled in-between oaks and pines and filled with the songs of phoebes, chipping sparrows, ovenbirds, black-throated green warblers, and blue-headed vireos. There is a phoebe nesting on the thwart of my upside-down canoe; a robin building a nest in the rhododendron that is just starting to bloom; and a barred owl nesting in the pine behind the garage. A broad-winged hawk occasionally zips through the trees – the last time I saw it, it had a mouse squeezed between its talons as it flew by.
Our two house lots are only two miles apart, but oh so different! The trees, the sun, the birds, the dirt. After gardening at my house my hands feel like sandpaper, all the moisture pulled out of them from the clay in the soil. I need to lather them often with thick layers of hand cream for several days to bring them back to life. After gardening at my friend’s house, my hands are happy – bathed in soil nurtured by grazing cows long ago – and not at all dry.
What a joy to find such wonderful dirt – the basis of life, tilled by beetles, worms, and centipedes – and a whole new chorus of songs to listen to while I dig.
