Dirt

I don't know much about ancestral memory. I think I may not want to. That is one of the great disappointments of having a natural curiosity in all manner of things. I develop subject lust very easily, and sometimes, you seek out knowledge and develop a deeper romance with your subject, because your understanding has moved beyond the crush stage of love. Sometimes, though, you research and you learn and what you get for it is the squelching of the fuzzy, vaguely romantic concept you've always had. Kind of like when you adore someone, then find out that they're a Clay Aiken fan. It just calls everything else into question....

Anyway, if ancestral memory gets explained to me in the language of cellular biology and genetics, I'd probably just go blank and write it all off as a crock of hooey. Meanwhile, however, I am free to think of it in picturesque terms, imagining some blood memory transferred to me by peasants, the kind that you see in Jean-Francois Millet paintings. Sturdy, stoic people with their eyes simultaneously on the dirt and on God.

If generations of farmers don't explain it, I'm not sure how else to account for my sudden urge every spring to go dig in the dirt. I have no idea why this should happen. I never dig in the dirt with much purpose. I garden like some people diet - if I'm going to stick with it, results had better appear pretty quickly. And I'm no green thumb. I manage tomatoes, herbs, pansies if there's enough rain, but mostly, by July, somehow, I seem to have little to show for my efforts besides a few anemic hanging baskets of impatiens, no pun intended. Even if I fuss over little green shoots, it does no good. My sense in plants might be as good as my sense in relationships, because I somehow seem to find myself begging, pleading, worrying and fretting over only the most recalcitrant, ungrateful and unproductive of specimens.

My lack of success may be due to an embarrassment of riches. Maybe I just don't have any real sense of need. If I kill off five dollars worth of tomatoes, I'll go to the farm market. There's no sense that a lack of diligence on my part has any consequence, beyond the straggly brown detritus that is an embarrassing reminder of my inattentiveness. We'll not starve. On cold November nights, I'll not lie awake regretting my neglect of the carrots. And if they thrived? We might be wasteful, picking and eating what we wanted, what was attractive. There'd be no eleventh hour canning of produce, no neat array of 87 quarts of tomato juice, no pickling of excess cucumbers. We'd have little to show for the bounty aside from an obese groundhog. Or guilt would drive me, and there would be a series of frantic preserving efforts, consultations with the local extension office, purchases of a dehydrator, and I'd be stiff and irritated with resentment of lost weekends, unread books and unfinished knitting.

Who knows? If there is ancestral memory, perhaps my ancestral blood just doesn't take such vanity gardening seriously. You can't pay bills with petunias, can't sustain body and soul with a weeping cherry. Or perhaps, like most people of my generation, I'm just looking for a way to blame my failures, botanical or otherwise, on my parents.

Still, on Saturday morning, after lingering over an extra mug of tea, I'll put on grubby jeans and wander out to take stock of the green, growy things. I'll pull away dead grass, loosen up the dirt, assess progress, and wonder about the world's ability to annually renew life, in plants and in people.