Tasting Soil

Billions of microbes live in organically farmed soil, I bubbled to my mother. They change the soil so that it's more resistant to drought! They help feed the plants, and they help keep diseases away from plants’ roots! My mother is not keenly interested in soil or microbes, but she listened supportively to my little rant, and then surprised me by telling me something I had not heard before.

"Cousin Pauline said the soil tastes different now than it did when she was a girl, because of all the chemicals they use on the fields now," Mom said. Pauline, a very warm and grounded woman, grew up on the farm where my grandma was born in northwest Minnesota.

“She tasted the soil?" I asked.

“She must have,” Mom answered.

My eyes smarted with sudden tears that I could not explain. Looking back, I think they may have been tears of relief. For Pauline to speak unselfconsciously about tasting the soil, it seems to me that she must have felt a practical, matter-of-fact sort of intimacy with it. I have yearned so deeply for that kind of intimacy, but I have often felt lonely in that yearning, and have felt like kind of an odd duck because of it.

Pauline wasn't an odd duck. Although I met Pauline as a child and have vivid memories of her laugh, I know her mostly through my mother's stories. In those stories, she was rooted, practical, and brimming with life -- someone my mother loved and looked up to since she was a girl.

I asked my mother today about Pauline tasting the soil, and she explained that at the time, Pauline and her husband were moving to a farm that had been in her husband's family for quite a while. They tasted the soil to learn about the land they would be farming, and Pauline thought it tasted bad. From the taste, she and her husband thought that the previous farmers have been using chemicals heavily, and they later found out that they were right.

I did not know that story last April, on the first day my husband and I walked into the field of our new farm, but on that day, I remembered that Pauline had tasted the soil. The field where we walked was mud between rows of the previous year's corn stalks, which stood not quite as high as our hips. We crossed our land, noticing the way the color and texture of the soil changed in different locations. Ian scooped some soil up in his hand and tried to make a snake out of it to see how much clay it had. Sheepishly, I tasted some of it. More than the taste, I noticed its sandy texture between my teeth, and I have no idea whether it tasted good or bad. It tasted like dirt.

Some day, I hope I know some of what Pauline knew. I hope I can understand more of the story that the soil tells.