This first year, the potato plants in the water-logged soil
beneath the mountains made a bedraggled- looking crop. They went in late, so we
dug them in late October.
As we uncovered them, I kept thinking how they would have
looked to famine-time diggers. Bright nuggets, valuable as gold; each a
life-saving package of food. Each clod of earth yielding, or not, its
life-saving load. Each decent-sized potato bringing a rush of relief, each
marble a disaster.
How carefully they must have dug with their children’s lives
at stake; potatoes rolling away with the loosened soil, disappearing into the
ground, fingers scrambling after them. How it must have bound families together
in their struggle to survive; how strong must their kinship with the soil have
been.
A different life now: my kitchen stocked with oranges from
Spain, olive oil from Italy, wine from France; leisure filling the space that
was filled with struggle and fertile soil disappearing under concrete.
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