Helping God Make Dirt
By Elizabeth Hunter
My friend Judy couldn’t believe her husband Bill wasn’t depressed about turning 60. “Don’t you feel older than dirt?” she asked him. Bill didn’t. Even when the weather is hotter than a preacher on Judgment Day, he’s a sunny soul. Since taking early retirement, Bill’s been restoring an 80-acre apple orchard and regaling tourists with tales (tall and otherwise) on hayrides he conducts when he isn’t pruning or picking. He should be dog-tired at day’s end, but on Saturday nights he likes to sashay out to Young’s Mountain Music to waltz with the widow women while Judy dozes in a chair.
“Ask him if he feels older than God’s dog,” I suggested.
“That’s a good one.”
“Right up there with ‘dumber than a box of rocks.’” Judy and I are “from off,” in the local parlance. (You don’t have to be from very far off to qualify as an exotic here. “From off” begins at the county line.) One of the things we love most about living in the Blue Ridge Mountains is listening to our older neighbors — and some of the young’uns who were lucky enough to be knee-babies and lap-babies around their grannies and papaws. We love the expressions they use. Language rich in idiom is deeply rooted in these hills and hollows, though it’s losing ground now to the popular culture. That prompts some of us — natives and transplants alike — to hoard old turns of phrase the way gardeners save heirloom tomato, bean, and corn seed. We’re trying to preserve a gene pool endangered by monocultural applications of “awesome” to anything I’m straying, though. I need to set my plow to the furrow, to get on with the subject of helping God make dirt. Not that He needs help in that department. He makes great dirt all by Himself, though not necessarily quickly. You can be dumber than soap and still grasp that the Good Lord has all eternity to turn oak leaves into soil. But I’m an impatient mortal. I want something other than red clay to garden in. I want it for next spring. Which is why, when I saw in the newspaper that the agricultural extension office in the next county over was sponsoring a series of free composting workshops, I gave them a call. Though I was from off, they said I could sign on. In less time than it takes to shake a stick, they believed they could convert me and other raw recruits into “master composters.” The idea made me a bit queasy. It suggested nightmare visions of myself — rotund, with a green hide composed of 60 percent post-consumer waste — for sale in a garden supply catalog. According to the experts they called in to hold prayer meeting with us on the subject of compost, the Lord’s microbial legions will make dirt out of whatever materials you gather together. “It’s a win-win situation,” one said, using an expression I’d like to compost. The mastery lay in getting the ratios right for “greens” and “browns,” moisture and oxygen. Learn to do that and you could have a life-enhancing pile of loose, humusy dirt in considerably less than God’s own time. You know what that means? That you can make young dirt — which no doubt also explains how Judy’s Bill can be older than God’s dog and still feel younger than a spring chicken. Now that’s awesome! I was telling some friends about all of this — explaining how I amuse myself, raking over the language as I corral old leaves to mix with refrigerator relics fuzzy with mold, adding a dab of this and a dab of that, cooking up young dirt (and the kind of expressions I hunger for) — when one of them threw me another bone to chew on those bright afternoons when I’m out on my hillside helping God. “You don’t want to lick your calf twice,” she said. “What?” I said, having watched a cat lick its newborn kittens and finish off with the afterbirth, thinking of the size of a calf, thinking, “I wouldn’t want to lick my calf even once.” “You don’t want to lick your calf twice.” Like a box of rocks, that’s the way I felt. I couldn’t get past the sensation of hair on my tongue. “What?” I said again. “It means you don’t want to have to do the same job over again.” Not that job anyway. Though dirt-making is something I’m sure I’m going to enjoy helping God with long after the cows come home. Till I go south. Buy the farm.
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