the promising land

Now that we're getting settled here, enjoying this Sabbatical space in Alberta, I suppose that some of what I’m thinking now are plain comparisons: urban vs. rural.  It’s been so many years since I’ve spent any significant amount of time (i.e. more than a few days) in a rural setting, even though I grew up in one – this one. 

There are the frogs and there is the dirt.  The frogs remind me of the way sound, the white-noise of the city, is so particular to the city.  I almost go without noticing it while we live in it, except that once in a while a siren jolts me out of my complacency, and then all the urban noises seem to be impressed on me with orchestral precision.  The bass of the trucks, the tympani of the horns, the strings on the sky train track. 

Today it was the dirt which impressed itself on me here.  In the city, we have managed to control dirt in nearly every way.  There are so few spots where dirt hasn’t been covered or manicured with carefully selected or heavily pruned vegetation.  

But there is dirt here.  Dirt for the taking. 

In Vancouver, we had a neighbour who once “borrowed” a few wheelbarrows of beautiful, fresh black soil from the playground near us when it was being landscaped.   It didn’t go unnoticed… the imported soil in her yard perfectly matched the gouge in the playground.  People were not impressed. 

But here, there is dirt to spare.  My uncle took a front-end loader full of it tonight from somewhere on this 600 acre span.  Did he notice my wonderment as we stabbed our shovels into it and filled the old fence post holes that dotted the hill?

The boys didn’t just wonder at it… they reveled in it today.  I took a rake and leveled the garden, stretching the rake out as far as I could and bringing it in toward me to make it smooth, just so.  After walking back and forth, smoothing and re-smoothing, I was satisfied with the blank canvas, no furrows or divets or mounds to speak of. 

Just as I was about to gather the seeds and bedding plants, I heard a gleeful hurrah and turned to see Gideon run across the recently raked patch of earth with abandon and delight.  Levi was close behind him, laughing and kicking up the warm earth.  Levi hadn’t just taken his shoes off: there was nothing to prevent him from fully experiencing the thrill of the dirt and before my very eyes, he laid down, and like any sensible creature, he began to roll in it.  I don’t mean any sarcasm in that.  We’ve been watching the horses roll in the pasture all week, and the newborn bison calves, and the old motherly bison cows too.  They all bend the knee, lay down and relinquish themselves to the soil.  

And so did my son.  Dirt in his ears, his nose, his hair.  And pure joy over all his being.  What could I do?  Shake the rake and shoo the boys out?  Or let them feel the earth, the loam from which they were made, the ground that produces their favourite carrots and strawberries, the terrain that defines landscape and souls cape?

I let them roll.  And when they had had their fill, I watched them run off, took up the rake again and went back to smoothing. 

Then I kneeled, and felt the soft, warm perfection under my knees and scooped a bit of it up with my hands.  Just plain old dirt.  The stuff of promise. And I felt my heart swell with the simple joy of it.     

Some of it remains under my nails.  I will leave it there for now.  A reminder, a sign, an invitation.