So, I went into that summer expecting days full of air conditioning and tv and hours wasted away s, but my mom had different plans. We had moved into a new house after the divorce, and she decided she wanted a garden. So, with the slow boil of summer beginning, we got to work, and the memories of AC and TV faded into the realm of what could've been. The first project was an enormous vegetable garden with wildflowers interspersed. Cone flowers will grow just about anywhere, and zucchini squash’ll fake it, at least for a season or two. Where I grew up, you’d have about an inch of chirt, that mixture of dirt and small rock, before hitting thick, hard clay that went down about six feet. You couldn’t dig a hole without a maddock, and that summer, I dug some holes.
Finally, after that first summer, all we had was a bumper crop of crispy squash vines, my mom got desperate. The ground in Red Bank (named after all that clay) was tough. Parts of the Tennessee Valley are known for their rich soil, deep, black, and full of life. But not the stuff where we lived. And one day, she stumbled across an ad in the paper for a truck load of topsoil on the cheap, and her desperation and frugality combined into a perfectly irresistible urge. The truck pulled into the yard, leaving deep ruts behind, and the dusty pile splashed to the ground. I’ve never seen my mother swing so quickly from pure, joyful anticipation to the depths of disappointment. What they left behind was topsoil, yes, but Red Bank topsoil. Nothing dark and moist and fluffy there. No, it was hard and crusty and full of tiny rocks. It was tan and dry and, for me, it meant the end of any remaining hopes of a pleasant summer. That dirt pile was disappointing enough, but it presented us with two very real problems. One, mom had paid for it, so we had to use it. And two, it was an entire, unsightly mound at the side of our garden. So we had to deal with it. Mom, being her own tenacious self, decided we needed to figure out a way to use it. But you couldn’t put that stuff into the garden as it landed, because it was as much rock as it was dead dust.
Step one--and this was by far the worst part—she made us screens with centimeter wide gaps between the woven wire, and we’d spread one shovelful of dirt pile on at a time. Dust and pebbles sifted through onto the tarp below, and rocks stayed bouncing around on top. It was like panning for gold without the excitement of discovery. And the fruit of our efforts was glorified dust, lifeless dead stuff, but it didn’t have any rocks to it, so that was a plus. So, once sifted, we spread that on top of the garden. Meanwhile, early in the process, my mom realized just how ill-advised her purchase had been, so she got to work figuring out how to breathe some kind of new life into that dusty pile. That’s when she learned about compost.
We built a simple, four-sided enclosure and started dumping kitchen scraps in this funny looking box in the backyard. Now, we had a German Shepherd at the time, that family dog, and she loved the thing. She’d jump into those rotting banana peels and apple cores, and root around. She’d dig a little or just lay on top of the warm pile. That became her throne. One day, we were out sifting dirt, and Mom looked up to see the dog digging at the base of the throne.
Just as Mom was about to yell in frustration as yet another yard project went south, she noticed the slow magical reality of what happens to rotten banana peels. The dog, satisfied with her digging, loped off, and what she left behind was a black cascade of rich soil spreading at the base of the pile. Mom immediately grabbed a shovel and stuck it in the hole, and it slid right into that amazing soil. It was hot and clumpy, and it moved! That dog had inadvertently given us an easy way to get at the good stuff on the bottom, and boy did we.
She had churned and mixed the pile for us, too, even added her own body heat to speed the process along. She was our Compost Queen, and every spot of that garden would benef from her hard work.
Soon enough, hardy plants that could grow anywhere gave way to delicate things that required better dirt with more nutrients. All that to say, Mom and I ...and that dog...we gave dirt life.
My Grandaddy once explained the difference between soil and dirt. Soil is organic stuff that has life to it. It’s full of little organisms and bacteria and critters. Dirt, well dirt is the same stuff, but it’s dead. There’s no life to speak of. That truck pile, that was dirt. But the stuff the family dog dug up, that black stuff that moved, that was soil.
The magic of it all, the miracle of it, is that dead dirt doesn’t have to stay dead.
Get some of those critters in there, and you can breathe life back in, and it’ll become life-filled and life-giving soil over time. Even with dirt, death doesn’t have the final say. And once we mixed that filler dirt with that rich composting soil, Mom’s gardens exploded. Life came out of every corner, and the bounty was overwhelming. To this day, wherever she lives, the first thing mom does when she moves in, before the plots are even measured out, the first thing she does is build a compost pile.
This parable about Jesus throwing Good News seed around requires one thing, and that’s good soil. Seeds fall all over the place, bake in the summer sun or wash away with summer rains. But good soil? That’s where Jesus takes root. But I want to push a little, especially after spending so much time with my hands in the ground. You see, I don’t think Jesus is a delicate flower; I think Jesus is a weed. I have a suspicion that he can take root just about anywhere, even where you don’t want him. Once the roots are there, he spreads like nothing else, laying down more roots and anchoring to that dirt. And he dies, gives back to the soil a little richness it didn’t have. New life springs from that gift, and that enriched soil gives way to fruit and bounty and treasure we never could’ve imagined in us cracked dirt piles before.
Maybe all that’s a stretch, looking for resurrection in the stuff under fingernails, but I’m not sure it is. We ought to be looking for God everywhere, little glimpses of the kingdom in all our doings, even trucks of unwanted dirt. After all, there’s no dirt so dead that life can’t come back to it, and there’s no place God can’t take root. Maybe we don’t have to be the best soil, maybe we don’t even have to be good soil. But I think there’s something to embracing what makes soil better, and that’s rot. Death and decay in the garden don’t have to mean the end of things, they hold potential and point to something working under the surface. ‘Cause there’s new life brewing in every end. And that feeds everything else. Becoming better soil, we actually enrich the stuff around us. Death doesn’t get the final say; resurrection does. New life does. And there’s always new life, always resurrection, ‘cause there’s always God, and there’s always dirt.