Eat Dirt

I have a window box of dead plants hanging off my balcony rail. I tried to pull them a few weeks ago in preparation for spring, but the hunk of soil came out in a big rectangular chunk: frozen solid.

Today, I went for a sunny walk with my friend Michelle, and she’s got little green shoots poking up through the ground outside her house. Not just poking out, but actually moving little stones to make their grand entrance. She thinks they’re daffodils, but they might be tulips.

I found this very exciting.

I have tulips in a pot on my deck, too. They’re not poking up yet, but the soil in my window box was soft today. I pulled out the dead roots and shook them, crushing the hunks to save as much of the fresh dirt as I could. It was wonderful. So cool and refreshing and relaxing.

I had just watched a program on Nova about how the astronauts, trapped in Mars-trip simulators for 6 months at a time. They were under severe emotional and physical stress. But they were given light boxes and tongs and gloves in which they somehow (with no gravity and funky air) grew and tended to little stalks of wheat. Scientists found that touching the dirt and the plants, especially in order to care for them and eat them fresh, radically improved stress levels.

I could see how. I took a moment to dig my fingers in my pot of dirt, stick my nose right down in there. The extreme cold of Mars, the extreme cold of Minnesota winters: My stress levels radically improved. Oh—it smelled so good. Dirt smells so wonderfully good.

My sister eats dirt. She has digestive troubles, and she is slightly obsessed with alternative supplements. These days, she eats dirt. She pays a lot of money for the dirt, which she buys online. I presume it arrives in little packets at her apartment. Does she mix it in yogurt? Stir it into her martini? Just munch it from garden trowel? I don’t know. Recently, she went a few weeks without her dirt and she felt horrible. This could have been compounded by her PMS and the stress of putting together and art show and a fight with our mother. She blamed it on the dirt. She swears she instantly felt at peace when she got her dirt fix. I told her she’s officially gone over the deep end. But hey—she could be onto something. Dirt is great stuff. It makes us feel better. To which I say: Dig in, sister.