She keeps calling me out (Guest Post).

A week or so ago, my loving wife called me a Dirt Worshipping Dog Hoarder.  Granted I dragged the family 3 hours south to buy another dog, and yes I have been spending the day, sun up to sun down, outside getting dirty and sunburned for the last couple of weeks, but just like the Gamble Oaks bud out, make leaves and drop them to the forest floor, I have a job to do.

Each and every morning that I have awakened this Spring as my loving wife is headed off to work, I have thought to myself, “I am going to do some serious spring cleaning today…  I am going to pull out the stove and clean out behind it, clean the fridge, take all the sofa cushions covers off and run them through the wash and hang them on the line so that that wonderful spring air can infiltrate them.” Despite my intentions, however, I haven’t done any of these chores. 

We could blame a millions things…. I am lazy or unmotivated.  I have ADHD.  Maybe I am hoarding all the Legos, popcorn pieces, and wooden food that are jammed into my sofa.  I think it is much more direct than all these things.  There are no underlying problems.  It’s Karma.  Every action has a reaction.

The earth is prodding me to tend to her.  With beautiful spring weather, she is not angry like she was last year.  We have had no hot hurricane force winds.  Occasional spring rains have filled the rain barrels and pushed the green tops of garlic above the surface of the earth.   Clouds have been rolling in over the last week, as if it were June, and the hops plants are pretty sure it is that time of year, too.   She is offering me a gift, and I am not going to waste it. She prompts me to cajole spring into this rocky hill top desert soil, to feel her soil in my hands.  She longs for the release of life waiting within her seeds.  She craves for the children to dig in her and bounce around in the water she tenders from 500 feet under the surface upon which these children play.

A happy hops plant.

I have nurtured this native brown, sandy, rocky soil.  My role is simple.   She provides everything I need on this little piece of earth.  If I listen to her, she tells me what to do.  To the rocky sandy soil that packs too hard for tender roots, she asked that I add the natural mulch that has formed over many years under the pine tree forest canopy that surrounds my home.   After I brought her the natural mulch she asked me for decaying leaves.  At first glance out into the Pinion and Juniper forest, decaying leaves seem overtly absent.  If it weren’t for a little shrub often treated as a nuisance, the leaves she craves would not be available. 

While in the Midwest the acorn grows into a mighty Oak, up on this hill the acorn grows into a small shrub called a Gamble Oak.  Under the low hanging branches of Pinion and Juniper forest, the ground-hugging groves of gamble oak grow.  Simply impassable to humans, the coyotes, rats, rabbits, and snakes enjoy a life oft too uncommon to wildlife in most of this country.   Each fall these little shrubs shed their leaves much in the same way that their mighty cousins do Back East.  Over the years the leaves pile up, holding tight to the earth below the ground hugging branches of the gamble oak, tight enough that the hurricane force wind of spring can’t blow them away.  And there they sit year after year nurturing this rocky sandy soil.

Our soil before and after.

As the Gamble Oak provides leaves year after year, I too have a job.  I am coordinator of nutrients, collector and deliverer of water, nurturer of soil and plant, I provide cover when a late frost threatens tender young plants.  Before this Spring I didn’t know how to serve her.  This hill on top of this mountain seemed incapable of growing food.  Until, I listened.  All I had to do was listen. 

I do her bidding, and she thanks me with beautiful weather, sunburns, dirty tired children, ecstatic dogs, glories sunsets, endless vistas, and harvest.

I guess my loving wife was half-right when she called me a Dirt Worshiping Dog Hoarder the other day.  My actions in service to this earth are a form of worship.  I listen and provide for her and she provides for us.

As to the latter half of my loving wife’s conjecture, we only have 4 dogs.  You're not hoarding until you have 5.

Garlic poking up at sunset near the slow watering bottles set in the garlic bed.