Gardening, aka, Playing in the Dirt

Childhood Bliss

As a child, I loved to play in the dirt. I found many a happy place to do so: the sandbox, unpaved driveways, ditches, puddles. I consider the near omnipresence of dirt to be one of the best perks of living in the county.

At one point, our neighbors dug out a space for a pool, depositing a veritable mountain of red Georgia clay in their backyard. At least, it looked like a mountain to my small eyes. We girls spent many hours burrowing through the clay. I vividly remember that we were making underground castles for the local frogs and toads. We probably caught a few and tried to sell the home to their fancy: it never took.

We played Hebrew slaves making bricks in our clay ditches. Thank you, Charlton Heston and the Ten Commandments. Sadly, even though we mixed straw into the clay, our bricks never turned out even nearly right. I thought that was what they did in the movie. Our frogs, at least, had their castle even though they didn’t want it. We wanted a brick house but it just wouldn’t happen.

Our area is rich in a fine white clay called kaolin. We gleaned what we could from the hillsides, wetted it and tried to make pottery with it. So smooth and white, the dried kaolin left a fine film on our hands, but it never made good pots.

I remember playing in a little patch of sand near our house when my mother called us in because there was a tornado warning. Now, that just made more sense to me than a tornado watch. I could never figure out why a big watch was so scary. It wasn’t even a clock! Anyway, the tornado never came and my sister and I returned to our play.

All Work and No Play?

Those were happy days. Hopefully, you can recall similar ones. Hopefully, you had a mom like one of my friends, who says she gauges the happiness of her childrens’ day by the amount of mud on their clothes.

We have to admit that those glory days just aren’t going to return in quite the same form. My neighbors may comment if they see me making mud-pies and building sand-castles. There’s a good possibility that “counseling” and “more rest” are words that may be tossed over the fence. We have to get creative with how we do things.

Enter gardening. We adults can have sandboxes, too. (Although, I highly recommend loam or dirt for better results). Maybe the frogs will continue to be ungrateful, but the peas will surely appreciate the rows I dig for them. Pull some weeds and you will find that happy dirty film beginning to coat your fingers again. Perhaps those happy days are not so far off, after all.

There’s a lull in the daily chores. The housework can wait. The baby is asleep. Mama is restless. I grab my rose pruners and walk out the door: “Kids, Mama’s going to play in the dirt.”