Dirt.

I came up with this topic whilst walking back from the gym today, where I had almost the whole place and a fat back issue of Vogue featuring the ridiculous wedding festivities of Marilyn Manson and Dita von Teese all to myself.

I like dirt. More specifically, I like digging in dirt. When I was a kid I remember being in awe of the lowly potato. My father grew a patch of them at his mother's house and I got to help with the harvest. I loved digging in the ground and finding the little starchy brown-jacketed treasures. Later, I discovered carrots and beets, and then parsnips, the Bunniculas of the carrot world. I'm a big fan of root vegetables.

When I lived on Martha's Vineyard part of my trade for living there for free was manual labor. A high school friend and I would bicycle home from our jobs, strip to shorts and a bra, and hack away at roots in the scrub brush that dominates the center of the island. We employed elementary physics to move large rocks, and hauled in soil from a pile up the driveway. It was immensely satisfying work. When we were finished for the night, we'd eat salads and enormous bowls of 10-bean soup while listening to the radio.

Later I decided to start a vegetable garden of my own. This was when I was rooming with an artist friend close to the banks of the Souhegan river, in Wilton, NH. We were living in a converted barn with a full basement and a lush backyard. I didn't get around to planting anything in the garden until quite late in the summer, mainly because I was having too much fun just tilling the soil. I'd come home from work, put on my torn gray Hampshire College t-shirt with the sheepdog on it, some green shorts, sandals, and a floppy straw hat, and just start digging. I used a green oak-handled shovel I got from the Agway owned by the family of a friend of my sister. I turned up horseshoes, rusty nails, broken glass, and bits of bone.

The summer I left the chickenfucker I spent one solid afternoon in OSB's side yard with one of those skinny tree saws, a shovel, and an axe, taking out my frustration and an ancient flowering bush. I spent a fair amount of time with my heels dug in and my ass hovering just above the ground, pulling with all my might. I got the bush out eventually and OSB and her daughter and I picnicked recently in the clearing that's left.

Now I live in the city, where there isn't any dirt to dig. I suppose I could have at it with my Agway shovel in the Boston Common, but I'd probably get arrested. The lack of dirt gives me something to work for, I suppose: A plot of land all my own, with soil ripe for tilling.