I’ve always felt that time spent gardening is time well spent, whether fertilizing, seeding or harvesting. It’s not just the dirt under my fingernails, but the smells that signal the time of year, the damp scent of decaying leaves, the spicy smell of tomato vines.
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I've always felt that time spent gardening is time well spent, whether fertilizing, seeding or harvesting. It's not just the dirt under my fingernails, but the smells that signal the time of year, the damp scent of decaying leaves, the spicy smell of tomato vines.
With a touch of frost already hardening some of the ground around my cabin in southwestern Maine, a mid-October Sunday afternoon seemed an apt time to turn the garden down for the season. The musty odor of the soil let me know it was fall, along with the earthy smell of freshly dug potatoes in my raised garden bed.
I looked across the acre or so of low-bush blueberries that abut the garden. The now crimson-colored blueberry thicket spreads to a glacial ridge at the back of the property, then down a steep embankment to a branch of the Crooked River. Thickly wooded pine trees frame the scene and give off their own version of music as the wind bustles through them.
Broken only by the piercing sound of a blue jay seeking some late grapes, the serenity of the garden momentarily removed me from the comity lacking in the presidential debates and society in general, the pressure of pushing too much work into too little time, the questions that poke my mind about my place in the world and what I could do to make things better.
Those precious moments of garden smells, dirt scratching through my fingers and finding a plump potato under seemingly idle soil imparted a deep awareness of being alive in a diverse natural community that I rarely find elsewhere in my life.
Henry David Thoreau's words in his book “Walden” came to mind: “I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life and see if I could not learn what it had to teach and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.”
I lived a short drive from Walden Pond for most of my adult life and have spent much time there, including the day before I dug under the garden. Walking around the pond, similarly, brought a feeling that touched the depths of my soul and enlivened me.
But there was another reason for my working in the garden that day. The Fryeburg Fair was in full swing, and with all the traffic passing through that small town, I postponed my annual trip to the White Mountain National Forest to hike.
I thought of all those people “from away” braving the traffic to see the natural wonders in Maine and neighboring states.
I realize tourism is a huge industry for Maine, but for visitors and Mainers alike, the chance to recoup part of ourselves and our place in the natural world is priceless, whether it's at a country fair, amid the red and yellow maple trees in the forest or in our own back yard in the garden.