The dirt on dirt

It's common, abundant—and a glorious gift from God | Andrée Seu

The year I was in landscaping after my husband's death, a friend gave me a book titled Dirt, which landed on the shelf and has sat there since, collecting dirt. Why should I read a paean to compost rather than David McCullough's John Adams and Michael Denton's Evolution? But almost as a dare the gift has been dusted off now, a gauntlet thrown at the author's feet: Go ahead, make dirt interesting for 200 pages.

I have long had such an adversarial relationship with soil (shoes are left at the door here, in Korean style—the one house rule I've dug in my heels on) that I had forgotten the love affair I once had with the stuff.

It was 1975 and I was saved, and the world was new and all, and Sally and I took old Mrs. Chesbrow's half acre and turned it into a garden to make Nebuchadnezzar proud. It wasn't our doing, of course, and that was the wonder of it. We gave the earth seed and it gave us back zinnias, and bachelor buttons, and snapdragons, which we delivered from a rumpled station wagon to wealthy Cape Cod dowagers by the sea who commanded fresh flowers in every room, changed every week. Man, how I loved being dirty.