Earlier this month, when the sky was orange and flat and a voice in the back of my head kept saying, ‘This is it,’ when I panic-ordered an air purifier that didn’t arrive for weeks, I watered my house plants. This is something I do regularly, plants needing water to sustain life and all. But this time I noticed the smell — the scent of wet dirt somehow permeating nasal passages clogged by my gnarly summer cold.
It was like breathing in the color green. And having the windows closed meant I could also hear the water sinking into the soil: a sound like pouring milk on Rice Krispies. I wanted to put my ear right next to it, so I did. Baby’s first plant ASMR.
I have decided to have a dirt girl summer. So far this means I’ve been spending a lot of time in my community garden. After two years on the wait list, I finally got a box — a 4-by-8-foot plot on loan from another garden member for the season. I’m sharing it with my friend Laura, and we planted it a few weeks back with three tomatoes, a cucumber, a tomatillo, a pepper, some lettuces, and a bunch of herbs: lavender, patchouli, lemongrass, eucalyptus, and jasmine. We kept a raspberry and a native blue aster growing in there already, and we’ve since added some potted lemon balm and Thai basil. One of us waters the plot every day. Nothing is thriving yet except the raspberry, which is a thorny bramble that would probably grow on the face of Mars. Everything else is in stasis, waiting out what have been unseasonably cold overnights for New York.
My grandma used to grow things. She kept a garden at the Missouri house she and my grandpa lived in for most of their lives. Every summer we picked fresh cherry tomatoes from the big pots by the back door. Towers of basil sprung up at her command. The hydrangeas and hostas in her yard were the fullest and greenest on the block. After she died two years ago, I learned that she’d been even crunchier in her younger years, making her own yogurt long before instant pots and buying fresh eggs whenever she could.
I inherited a pair of my grandma’s gardening gloves. They’re not special — you could probably find them at Costco (which is almost certainly where she bought them). They are bright pink, with rubber uppers and a softer cloth underside. Pink isn’t really my thing; it’s a color that feels like it’s mocking me, pointing out that the gulf between the person I’ve become and the one I used to be isn’t as wide as I might like to think. Still, I can’t get myself to get rid of the gloves or to wear anything else when I’m working in my box. I’m hoping the ghost of her hands convinces my seedlings to thrive as much as hers once did.
Then again, sometimes I don’t wear gloves at all. Good soil has its own microbiome which, when we come into direct contact with it, has been shown to have mood-boosting effects. Sometimes I like to stick my fingers in the dirt, swirl them around, and imagine my pores breathing in the earth, the earth traveling through my bloodstream to my brain centers to boost my serotonin production. Imagine going elbow deep. Imagine burying myself in soil to soak up everything it can give me. Imagine coming out again, skin clear, decongested, depression cured. Imagine never coming out — sinking so deep that I make friends with the worms and a baby tree sprouts through my chest.
The sky is back to hazy today, and I wonder again whether this is our future. I’ve been scrolling through StreetEasy, looking for apartments to buy as though I could actually afford one. But what’s the point in living anywhere if you can’t open your windows? I think I can feel the plants in my life working overtime to filter the smog that’s settled around us. No wonder the baby tomato on my fire escape isn’t looking so hot. We ask so much, and get so much, and acknowledge barely at all.
I have mono again — the third time in something like 10 years. Weak immune systems R Us. The first time I had it was my sophomore year of college; I was supposed to go on an alternative spring break trip to Charleston, South Carolina, to tutor kids or learn about urban farming or something. I had fundraised for the trip for months, but when February rolled around, I drove to my grandparents’ house in St. Louis instead. It snowed for most of the two weeks I was there, and I moped around their massive old home like a shadow, trailing a blanket and sporting blueish eye bags. My grandma made me cup after cup of tea and brought me my favorite lunch of ‘things on a plate’ (cheese, crackers, fruit, Costco chicken salad, whatever was on hand). By the end of those two weeks I was mostly recovered, although the 15-minute walk across campus still left me winded, even when the weather started to clear.
The University of Missouri’s campus is technically a nationally recognized botanical garden; the school claims to use minimal fertilizers and natural pest management. Its gardeners focus on native plants, to the benefit of pollinators like monarchs. Every spring the campus is overrun with blooms. It’s one of the only things I liked about going to Mizzou, along with Ellis Library with its moldy book smell and mazes of stacks. And, of course, the fact that it was a two-hour drive from my grandparents’ place, my grandma’s tomatoes, my grandma’s nature walks, my grandma’s whole life before me stretching back years, all lived in that house where she eventually gave up the world. By the time my mom brought her to Texas, she was so rooted in the Missouri soil that she barely survived the trip.
She never tried to grow anything in Texas, even though the climate would’ve made for a thriving herb garden. Instead, she checked out. I don’t really get it — I’m too young and too restless with too much to do. But on some level, I understand: the exhaustion, the cynicism, the siren call of the soil. We brought her back to Missouri to be buried, and she’s there now, deep in the dirt she preferred.
Catch a feel
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