Today my friend Mary Elizabeth told me she loves my blog so much that I could write about dirt and she'd find it fascinating. While flattered, I told her that this New Year's Resolution of updating the blog once a week has become more challenging than I anticipated. I mean come on, once a week something worth writing about should happen or occur to me, right? Wrong. So I'm taking her up on the challenge; I am going to write about dirt.
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When I was a kid I was a pretty big tomboy. No, that's not accurate. When I think of a tomboy I think sports. I've never been a sporty girl. I was, however, a tough girl. All of my free time was spent outside. If I wasn't at school or doing some chore inside, I was out there. I was the only girl in my neighborhood my age, but there were lots of boys. Having 2 brothers, I became the girl in the sea of boys. I'd race my bike with them, play Ghost in the Graveyard with them, climb trees with them, pretty much whatever the boys were doing I was doing. But this is a story about dirt, so let's move along.
The place you could find me most often was in my neighbor Virginia's garden. Virginia was my grama's age and she had a nice big flower garden all along the side and back of her house. None of the houses in my neighborhood had fences, so it was like one huge yard behind all our houses. Virginia's garden was lined with bricks, some that were so deep into the ground you'd barely notice them. She didn't mind me poking around in there as long as I put everything back the way she had it. In fact, she kept a brown grocery bag on her back porch full of peanuts for all us neighborhood kids to snack on.
My favorite thing was digging up those bricks and finding the bugs underneath. My mom would save all the jars from mayonnaise, jelly, jalapeno peppers anything that was glass and had a lid was reserved for me. She'd take a hammer and steak knife and punch holes through the lids and then put them in the pantry. I would then take them as needed. I'd usually take as many as I could outside with me and then the digging would begin.
I'd spend hours overturning those bricks. I'd start in the front of the house, work my way up the side and end at the back where I'd pop a couple of peanuts and go back to the begining and do it again. Usually I'd find mostly worms and potato bugs. But my absolute favorite was when I'd slowly pick up a brick and there would be a huge beetle! My heart would always beat wildly with anticipation as I'd loosen the brick from the earth and sloooowly pick it up so as not to disturb whatever was living underneath it.
I was a bug girl for sure. I loved them. I had jars lining my bedroom full of them. My dad had some bug books that he gave me and I would study them. When I'd find a new bug I would read up on it so I could care for it while it shared my room with me. Did you know bugs have certain smells? Depending on the bugs, my room had a certain buggy scent. But I even loved that.
May & June where my favorite bug months because that was when the junebugs where out. Every year I would catch the biggest one I could find and give it fresh maple leaves daily. I wasn't too clever in naming them, because every year the one I'd keep would be named, appropriately, June.
You'd have been hard pressed to find a day when I didn't have dirt under my nails, on my face, in my hair or on my clothes. I bent plenty of kitchen spoons attempting to reach the bugs that would go down their hole before I could snatch them up.
Every year I had a Bug Zoo on our sunporch. I would line all my bug's up, write up little cards with descriptions of the bug such as it's name, what it ate, it's lifeline and any interesting facts. I'd charge all the neighborhood kids whatever coins they had to get in. It was a constant rotation of bugs. At the end of the summer, we'd all go to the corner store and buy tons of candy with the dollars I'd made over the season.
I once made a worm farm. All you need for a worm farm is a large mayonnaise jar and a smaller jar that fits inside it. Fill the space between the two jars with dirt and add worms. Keep the dirt wet, but not too wet, and soon you'll have baby worms crawling around in there like you wouldn't believe. My worm farm was at it's peak when it disappeared. I was wrecked. All my baby worms and mom and dad worms were going to shrivel up and die! To this day I have no clue where that worm farm went, but I have a hunch my mom had something to do with it.
The reason I think she had something to do with that was because of this--my most prized possession was my caterpillar brain. And sure, maybe it wasn't so much a brain as it was a skull or something like a skull, but it fascinated me. I kept it in my top dresser drawer right next to my prized troll with hot pink hair. That also disappeared. My mom did tell me she threw that one out, but she claimed it was an accident. I was hysterical for weeks after that.
Dirt was a constant part of my childhood. I wore it proudly. And to this day, there is something about being out in the yard gardening that makes a part of me come alive. Especially when I see a bug crawling around in the dirt. Suddenly I find that I'm not a 32 year old woman who works a professional job and has bills and responsibilities, but I am an 8 year old girl lost in a world that is never as far away as it feels.
