How Tiny Earth Relates to Me

I spent a while writing trying to write a post about how soil affects different aspects of my life. For someone who has grown up in a rural environment, you can imagine the list is long. My dad's business in part gets its income from selling compost and loam, we grow lots of our own produce, and I was the type of kid who would run around barefoot in the grass as soon as the ground was thawed in the spring and until frost covered it in the fall. The more I think about the soil, however, the more I think about how it impacted the bonds between me and my grandparents.

My grampy's garden was one of his prides in life, and he was always experimenting with something new. Watermelon, every color of carrot imaginable, zucchini the size of a cat, you name it and he probably at least tried to grow it. I can distinctly remember in the spring he would take my mom, siblings, and I on a little tour around to the different gardens he had going on by the house and at the bottom of the driveway next to his garage, updating us all about what he had growing. One of my favorite things he grew were parsnips, and I was always so excited when they were ready to pick because he would let me pull them out of the soil. I was always asking if they were ready to pick and my goodness was it like Christmas when they were finally ready. I didn't even particularly care for the taste, but it was one of the things that excited me most as a child.

But Grampy's favorite plant were his beans, green and those yellow wax ones. He planted more beans than we knew what to do with. I would bet you there's still a frozen bag of beans at the bottom of some freezer that's from one of those summers. Of course, that many beans to pick was not ideal for two elderly people, so many weekends during the summers of my youth (I say as a 19 year old) were spent over at my grandparents' picking baskets of beans for them. Now, this sounds like child labor, and it was, but these were also some of my happiest afternoons. For helping out, I was allowed to pick out a soda, maybe even two, from the garage fridge; an ice cold oasis packed with Mug root beer, blue raspberry Mountain Dew, and ginger ale.

Even better than a garage fridge soda was the dinners my grandparents would prepare afterwards. Corn on the grill, sausages, and whatever veggies were picked that day. Rhubarb pie to finish off the night. I still remember sitting in lawn chairs with my grandparents and my family, watching the sky turn from blue to orange, and begging my parents not to have to go home yet.

These are some of the strongest memories I have from growing up, and now that Grampy is no longer here with us and we grow the green beans at our house instead, they're something I hold onto dearly. When I say soil is important for growing our food, yes on a large scale it's vital for just about every item in the grocery store, but it's also much more than what's on the plate. The gardens were something that brought my family together, and I know similar experiences happen in other families, not just in America but worldwide. The way communities grow their food has influenced cultures for thousands of years. Preserving the soil is what can help people make connections to their family and the people they love, and at the end of the day that's what makes our lives worthwhile.