Doubt

I’ve got a lot to learn. It seems I don’t even know what tools I need, what techniques they’ll serve, how they’ll transform my backyard into more than its current state of desiccated stardust. I’m hoping to cultivate life itself? Call forth my own nourishment from dead-seeming dirt? If I lived in a world without commercial supermarkets, and my life actually depended on the work I do with my own two hands, I would die of starvation in no time.

Tools

As of yet my hands haven’t touched the dirt, only typed about that possibility with those soft pink finger pads. But they’ve gathered the few garden tools I have from the garage. Two flimsy gloves and a spade. A trowel? What do people call this? A hand shovel? Not that the words matter, only the work. Of course, I know as much about the work as I do about the words. I’ve got a lot to learn.

Hands

I have no calluses, yet. All pink, all smooth, all soft. My fingertips mostly tap keyboards and my palms do household chores. The nails are smooth with white crescent tips evenly arrayed above their lunulae. Lotioned knuckles, neat cuticles, age-old class markers, untapped potential. Soon they’ll be perpetually dirty, though, and probably rough. At least that’s the plan.

Dirt

Here is where it will all begin. It was once stardust. Now it is earth stuff. Ground-down rock, dried-up life, brown, down there underfoot. Elsewhere it’s paved over or covered in gravel and brick. The land gets layered with landscaping. In my own backyard, the plot that is mine (that I rent) is neglected. I live at the semiarid meeting of the Basin and Range region and the Great Plains, about three miles east of the Rio Grande where it trickles through Albuquerque’s city blocks. The dirt seems… dead.