Seattle, Washington
Written Sunday, April 19, 2008

Where have I been? Whatever became of me? You may wonder. So do I. Funny how time slips away. A week of nonstop adventure in Utah with senior son, his wife, and their two children, left little time for writing or reflection. And then closing down my house and studio there, traveling to Seattle via Grand Junction, Colorado, and Salt Lake City, only to arrive in the noise and traffic of the city and stand dismayed before a desk piled high with mundane busyness demanding my immediate attention - well, it’s daunting and disheartening and depressing. Instant stress. Avoidance and denial kick in. Can’t just turn around and go back to the mountains. Can’t deal with the pile. So I went for a walk . . .

DIRT

As background to this essay you should be told now that I have been perusing a new book - “PERFUMES” - written by two experts on the subject of smell, Luca Turin and Tania Sanchez. Early in the book I found this statement: “What scent drives men wild? After years of intensive research, we know the definitive answer. It is bacon.”

Hold that thought as I wander on.

Six blocks from my house is a sanctuary - a sacred place - an open air temple maintained by a religious community - the Brothers and Sisters of the Holy Earth. That’s how I think about it and them.

More literally it is called a P-Patch. An isolated piece of city property in the middle of a block, surrounded on three sides by wild blackberry bushes, unkempt woods, and on the fourth side by fences marking the back yards of several houses. The P-Patch is hidden. I found it last year only by wandering down a path leading away from a dead-end street.

The property is marked off into garden plots. Raised beds outlined by wooden frames and filled with rich dark soil, with pathways between the plots allowing access. For a small annual fee, people from the neighborhood raise flowers and vegetables and fruit trees in these plots - for their own use, but also to provide for local Food Banks serving the needs of the poor.

Though most of the P-Patchers have day jobs and professions and careers, they are farmers at heart who find great satisfaction in tilling and planting and growing on a small scale. They are old and young, male and female, in many shapes and sizes. Some are apartment dwellers without land, some have yards not designed for agriculture, some are friends who like sharing a project, some have families who do not share their farming tendencies, and some are just plain lonely and want the companionship of their tribe - the Green Thumbs People of this world who are not happy without a direct relationship with a patch of earth in which to grow things.

Alas, I am not one of these. Or I should say that I do not have a plot in the P-Patch and am not around often enough to tend one. Someday. It’s high on my life list to stay in one place through all the seasons to tend my own plot. Someday.

But for now I visit the P-Patch when I need to calm down and re-center myself in a sane environment. And to serve as a friendly witness to the enterprise of others. Visitors are welcome. They like and want Witnesses. Most of the tillers of the soil are what they call “P-Patch Proud” - and are pleased to brag a little about the quality of their produce. There’s just no way to avoid an unspoken air of good-humored competition over techniques and personal secrets and tricks of the farming trade.

The flowering fruit trees are in full bloom, and the hive of bees at the end of the P-Patch is already humming with activity. But it’s still early in the spring for planting most things. And this spring has been late and wet this year. Snow is predicted for the weekend. Because Queen Anne Hill is the highest ground in the city a frost is still a possibility. And having your garden fail because you were too eager makes you a P-Patch Fool.

So what is to be seen now is soil that has been prepared - cleaned of last year’s debris, mulched in with compost and fertilizer, raked and ready. Stakes and poles are in place for climbing beans and flowers and tomatoes and berries. The first week in May is usually the beginning of planting time.

Only one old man was at work when I was there on Friday.
“Can’t wait,” he explained. “Been cooped up all winter in the house.”
He knows he’s early - pushing his luck - but he’s been to the nurseries and has his plants and seedlings all ready to go in his closed-in back porch.
“Them onion people started it,” he says - “Already got their sets in. But I’m not an onion man. I’m a tomato man.  And only an idiot would plant tomatoes now. But I’m ready. Smell this.” He scoops up a handful of dark brown dirt and holds it under my nose.”

I smell.

The authors of the book, “PERFUMES” acknowledged that the smell of bacon drove men wild, but nowhere did they indicate the smell was available in a perfume bottle. Perhaps it goes rancid in a short time. But I agree and would follow a woman around if she smelled like bacon. The same for fresh-ground coffee.

Another scent missing from the book is the smell of planting soil in April. A woman who smelled like fecund earth would drive me wild. If Tango music was tangible - if you could run your fingers through the opening notes of “The New World Symphony” - or smell Frost’s poem about going down to clear the spring - or put naïve optimism in a bottle - or, well never mind flashy literary acrobatics - you know, if you are fortunate, the smell of unseeded soil in spring. Dirt - electric with possibility and promise.

I ran my hands through the dirt until I had it well-established under my fingernails. Then I asked the man if I could take some of it home with me. He gave me a quart-sized zip-lock bag of it, and as I write it is in a bowl on my desk in a place of honor. And the dirt is still under my nails.

This feel and smell of dirt in spring is an antidote to the frantic madness that takes over my life sometimes. I smell it. I touch it. I might even eat some of it - so that something elemental circulates through me and I am restored.

When I die I wish that my body and bones be composted - mixed in with dirt, and something planted in it that would grow and flourish and bloom.

If I only could, I would send you some of this sweet soil of late April as a simple gift, with the message: “Run your fingers through this.  Smell it. Close your eyes. Be calm. Be hopeful.”