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My maternal grandmother was laid to rest in the cemetery between Almelund and Taylor’s Falls, in the flat plateau above the St. Croix River valley. She was 92 years old, and she was cremated. There were some words from a clergyman-for-hire (who pronounced her name wrong) and from some family members, from my aunt and mother and even my father. Then the urn was placed into the ground, I think by my uncle (another golden boy).
To make closaure, the clergyman invited all of us to sprinkle the dirt over the urn in the hole. My mother went first, then my father, and I very nearly ran up to do it myself. I knelt on one knee and scooped up two handfuls of the sandy loam of the St. Croix watershed and I brought it to my nose and smelled deeply and said my goodbye and thanks.
That was just dirt, because the hole was deep and the cemetery was on a higher ground. It was brown and did not have much of a smell, maybe faintly of normal dirt like in one’s childhood when one played in the dirt.
Last spring across the road the kids who had bought the old Johnson farmstead were out in the middle of the meadow digging and my pups and I walked over to say hello. They were five of them, three young men and two young women. They were digging a trench across the old back yard of the leveled farmhouse and across the drainage ditch and up to the barn and new living quarters. The trench was for an Internet cable or something. It was a foot deep and a spade-blade wide. They were doing a heckuva good job at it. At a point along the trench in the fallow back yard I knelt down and grabbed some of the soil in two cupped hands and smelled so deeply and close to my nose that I breathed some in and coughed. It was moist and light and dark, very rich soil from 100 years of farmyard and then fallow meadow, and I was envious of its quality.
My ground is thin and heavy with clay and sand. I grow rocks well. And woods honeysuckle and big-leafed aster. I dream of good soil.
This year I was gifted access to a high-fenced-in garden with raised beds that have gone to seed for a few years. Some of the beds still have surviving legacy plants: raspberries gone to stalks, blueberries doing poorly, clumps of chives, a strawberry terrace that it is actually becoming overrun with wild strawberries, and a nice asparagus hill that already has nine healthy purple asparagus coming up.
The other beds went to weed and to prep for planting I had to rake, loosen, pull, turn over, rake again, and weed again.
The soil is rich. When turned it is moist and nearly black, but within a day with all the strong sun it turns to gray.
If we get rain, we will have snow peas and green beans, a bed of herbs, tomatoes and cucumbers, greens and radishes and turnips and carrots and beets, and – if we have a long enough summer – watermelon and corn.
It depends on the rain and the sun and the warmth and my labors. And so much depends on the quality of the soil.
Ashes to ashes, soil to soil. ‘Corso e recorso.’
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