Vashon is a little pile of gravel, sand and stone flour left behind when the last ice age glaciers retreated to British Columbia. It sits in the puddle called Puget Sound, or, if you include all the waters up to Vancouver Island, the Salish Sea. 

Some of Vashon got a layer of lovely soil from this frozen passage. There are parts of the Island with deep, rich dirt full of earthworms and, with the passage of years, blankets of humus layered like a parfait. 

This is not true of the part of the Rock on which I live. My house is perched on a rise, with a bit of nice soil that was once farmed — if I can judge by the tools and horse collar I have unearthed over the years. But this raised part slopes quickly down and across a flat section that quickly turns into marsh.  On the high ground are fruit and nut trees and nice pasture grass.  In the marsh is another life quite its own. And in the “in-between,” I attempt to grow flowers and food. 

The in-between is not rich soil. It is a thin layer of hard, tan dirt covering slimy gray clay that is wet in the winter, dry in the summer and nearly impenetrable all year long. Out of it grows scruffy grass and invasive weeds. This is where I learned the lovely and meditative practice of making dirt.

I love making dirt. I didn’t know that I would love it, but after over 30 years of it, I am a dirt-making enthusiast.

I started with cardboard boxes, the bigger the better.  My kids used to make these wonderful mazes out of refrigerator boxes for their birthday parties, and they are ideal for making dirt.  I laid them, flattened to make two thick layers, right on top of that scruffy grass interrupted with weeds. On top, I put whatever organic matter I could lay my hands on. I hauled wheelbarrows full of animal droppings from the pasture. In the fall and winter, it was layers of leaves. At that magic time of year when the tides wash seaweed onto our shores, I collected that by the bucketful and dumped it on. When we pressed cider, the dry apple pulp was added to the layers.

In desperation to be rid of a continuous output of cat litter and not willing to put it in the landfill, I sometimes put that on as well, and in so doing discovered that it broke up the clay on which I live, making it friable.  Sometimes I bought soil amendments — lime, greensand, charcoal, vermiculite — but not often.  Mostly it became a happy game of seek and find. All of this was added to and then left to become whatever it was to become. 

The rains of a year or two washed the salt from the seaweed and the acid from the cat litter.  After 12 to 24 months, I could go out with a shovel and turn it over, bit by bit.  The cardboard disappeared, or nearly so.  The organic matter had broken down to a happy mass of matter, writhing with worms. With each turn of the shovel, everything mixes into a deep dark, rich place just asking for seeds and plants.

It was hard for me, at first, to accept the months-to-years scenario attached to this dirt-making business. But I have grown to love its non-immediacy. For one thing, it gives a person time to think and dream and plan, and those are things we have less and less of in our fast-paced world. It keeps me from ripping out, tearing at and chopping away. It leaves room for a slower means of changing the landscape that is less final and aggressive. 

I have found that this choice against aggressive, non-reversible action has spread into the rest of my life, helping me make decisions in what I believe are better ways.

Also, when you are not pushing for Right Now, you free yourself to do things in manageable bits and pieces. I like this way of attacking problems; it is so much more encouraging than looking at a huge problem and knowing you can never finish it today. A person can be defeated at the outset when looking at a giant task.

Instead of being knocked senseless by some huge project, I now break it into small tasks, some of which take only a few minutes to complete. Thus, I can see the goal coming closer, however slow it may seem, with each step I take.

Making dirt taught me this gentler path. It is an ongoing lesson that spreads to all areas of life, and it is affirmed each time I look at the once-barren plots of ground, now thriving with beautiful growth.

— Debbie Butler is the secretary of both the Episcopal Church of the Holy Spirit and Niece Pumping Service.