by micmarmac

Created on: February 22, 2009   Last Updated: March 01, 2009

Earthly Wonders

The box cutter slides like a knife through butter through the packing tape binding the tools together. I grasp the wooden handle of the shovel just released and survey the overgrown vegetable patch, trying to forget the blisters that will soon be forming on my keyboard-soft hands. After a too long winter, spring has finally come and it's time to get dirty and plant a garden. I am ready for the grit under my fingernails and the aches and pains in long forgotten muscles. Gardening and everything that goes with it has been on my mind ever since I moved into this 100-year old Australian farmhouse.

The shovelhead easily disappears into the rich black soil. Last night I had cursed the rain that pounded menacingly on the tin roof. "There goes the gardening," I thought as I listened to the amplified machinegun-like sound. But early this morning the clouds split with a beam of sunlight that now glistened like crystal beads on the dewy spider-webs.

I place my rubber-booted foot on the shovel and force it into the earth. I hear a clink and think rocks. "Great." I mutter sarcastically and lift the earth filled tool. A clot of dirt parts to expose a small toy car, once blue but now blossoming with flowers of rust. I picture young boys with skinned knees making dirt highways while their mothers toil amongst the weeds.

I keep turning the soil and surprises keep surfacing. Very quickly I discover that a history snippet or biology lesson are often just a shovel away. Buried in the black earth of this old garden are stories of the families that lived here before. People long gone remain reflected in dirt-smudged remnants of pottery, glass and plastic while the permanent residents of the soil, the critters, carry-on unaware of our topside existence.

I find the torso of a plastic soldier, the arm of a cowboy and a complete orange Indian. The dirt fills the crevasses of his feathers and I scrape it out with my already grubby fingernail. Childhood memories of mud pies fill my mind as I wonder how long the toys have been buried. How many kids have played here over the past century? How old would that child be today? Would he even be living? Buried beneath the weeds colourful fragments of youth, as long forgotten as last week's lunch, surface to tell their tales.

I push the shovel back down and see the glimmer of glass. As I bend to pick the amber fragment from the wall of the hole I feel my fatigued muscles screaming. My fingertips run over the rounded edges and pock-marked

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