digging
TRANSCRIPT
There is a sl ight chil l in the air on this Wednesday
afternoon, but I only just register it moments before
entering the garden. I have taken a rare hour off
from work; it is my birthday and I am in God's Little
Acre, the garden associated with the food pantry at
First Presbyterian Church in Woodlawn.
Once I get to work digging, the chil l doesn't mean
much. I warm up quickly. We have a few beds that
need to be prepped. This spring has turned out to
be over-busy, as happens too often, and as usual
the planting and prep work in the gardens has
suffered.
Greens have been planted but nothing else. I t has
been a cool spring so far, and I am in no rush to get
fussy pepper and tomato plants into this weather.
But there’s sti l l plenty to do, and we are behind
schedule.
I t’s hard for people who have a feeling for spring
not to take that feel ing too far. The season seems
overwrought to us when it’s real ly we who are in a
state of muted hysteria. We anthropomorphize
nature in response to the warming weather and the
evidence of another cycle of l ife everywhere. I t’s a
buffet that we just can’t avoid making ourselves
sick at time and time again. Many of us are, in this
respect, perpetual chi ldren, not learning our
lessons and genuinely shocked when the same
consequences manifest over and over again along
with the thaw.
There’s just one shovel at the garden today and it’s
got a flat edge; not my preference for turning the
soil in a bed that has been left to its own devices for
a season or two and is now compacted. I t’s also not
sharpened. Very few of the shovels I have used
were or are. When I get to hear the singing of an
edged shovel, it’s good fortune rather than good
preparation.
Aldo Leopoldo, in A Sand County Almanac, praises
the shovel and its work and suggests that its bad
reputation is owing to the ubiquity of dul l shovels.
Probably so, in part, but it is also the frequency with
which shovels are used to earn one’s bread - that is
to say, with which the task is not of one’s own
choosing. Diggers of ditches could easily be added
to the Bibl ical hewers of wood and drawers of
water.
But on this day, I am not among them. I spade this
earth and toss it across the bed because the soil
needs air and it is a job of my choosing to aerate it.
When I tel l my partner on this garden, Lisa, about
the soil , she immediately talks about taking a gas-
powered ti l ler to it - which, of course, is the sensible
response. I t’s a good thing for me that I ’m
surrounded by sensible people, or I would never
get much done. But I wouldn’t mind a dreamer or
two more. . .
And I continue to dig. Here on this acre, we work
according to our pleasure and our interest in
helping others - and our abil ity to be goaded by the
crowd that gathers around the growers on and off
throughout the season. I am less often goaded than
others, but I do sometimes feel anxious about
whether we have enough planting packed in.
I t was my intention to plant lettuce this afternoon,
but I become absorbed in the digging and in the
concomitant excavating. Farming in Woodlawn
involves a great deal of col lecting of bricks and
stone. Our vacant lots are not vacant at al l but fi l led
with history and the detritus of demolished
buildings. Beginning immediately after the riots that
fol lowed behind the assassination of Reverend
Martin Luther King, Jr. on Apri l 4, 1 968, at the
Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee, the city of
Chicago tore every building down in Woodlawn it
could get its hands on for decades. Lots of pieces
of those buildings then got buried in the land, a thin
layer of dirt thrown over the pile. The demolition, if
not the cavalier disposal of material , sti l l continues
today, but with less of a frantic pace.
In neighborhoods in Chicago like Woodlawn, it can
often feel l ike we are sti l l struggl ing against those
decades-old memories, as if any positive plans are
rejoined with “Yes, but the riots . . . ” When King was
murdered, the whole country should have been
furious. I f we all hungered for peace the way we
say we do, maybe people in Woodlawn and other
South and West Side neighborhoods - and in D.C. ,
Baltimore, Louisvi l le, Kansas City and elsewhere -
would not have felt the need to riot. Or maybe we
would remember that week differently, at least. A
l ittle more deeply.
Like Leopold, I love the song of the shovel. Unl ike
him, though, I have only known it rarely. We have
been teaching ephemeral lessons here better than
enduring ones. As a result, we don’t sharpen our
shovels, among other neglectful acts. I t’s easy to do
less in precisely that way, especial ly in this place
and in this time. We are often praised here for doing
just a l ittle when, by doing so, we sometimes block
the way for someone who might do a lot more.
I bel ieve growing is deeply l inked to peacemaking;
it is perhaps the earl iest and most basic human
activity identified with reducing violence in our
everyday lives. There is a reason we refer to
cultural development as something we cultivate; it
is so perfectly true that a second meaning grew
alongside the first unti l we don’t real ly think about
why we say a person of sophistication has
cultivated that quality.
I don't know how God's Little Acre got its name. I t
seems unlikely that Sterl ing, the man who has
farmed the lot for the last 37 years and rules it,
would have coined that phrase first. His views on
rel igion are pretty skeptical.
I t is more likely that when he arrived to help the
congregants of First Presbyterian Church, who first
released the soil from the bricks and stone blocks
buried in it (or vice-versa), it had already been
named by one of them. I t had been their intention to
grow food here; it could not have been in anybody’s
mind that the young man from Tennessee who
quietly lent a hand would be the last of the group to
do so four decades later. I f we are now able to grow
for the pantry on this land, it is in large part because
Sterl ing kept that long-ago dream alive for so long
that the church was able to return to it a few years
ago and we were able to start planting here.
Riots and wrecking balls: how can tiny seeds stand
up to forces l ike this? Well , right away they do.
Violence tends to exhaust itself (though modern
warfare is working hard to overcome this).
Meanwhile, everyplace in the world, there are what
are called landraces, varieties of plants adapted to
the unique conditions of specific areas. Around
here, we call these weeds most of the time, but
they are the guarantors of a perpetual natural
presence in places where human beings, in our
infinite fol ly, have not made a place for nature.
I pul l a bunch of bricks, one large block, and most
of a tire out of the ground as I dig the bed - a
characteristical ly urban harvest. The earth is too
much clay; it wil l need some sand. I should bring it
and work it in before we plant, but I am hurried
most of the time these days.
Not here, though. Not today. Here I dig earth unti l I
see the time has passed when I should be home.
The shovel feels good and sl ides smoothly into the
dense, compact dirt. As I smooth out the parts of
the bed I have dug, I can feel the difference in the
earth, the room for plants to breathe and grow. I dig
a l ittle more, then stow the shovel and a couple of
other tools I pul led out and head out of God’s Little
Acre.