My hands still smell like soil

by Erin Tuttle

found here:  http://www.catapultmagazine.com/issues/alone/posts/my-hands-still-smell-like-soil

My hands still smell like soil

             only because today,

I planted Swiss chard

and beets

and others in the spinach family.

I scattered composites:

buttercrunch

bietina

romaine.

And I learned that longday onions

(family:  Amaryllis)

grow in cooler climates, so

if you want a Vidalia, better settle

for a Walla Walla.

Then there's Brassicaceae,

kohlrabi and kale and

Chinese cabbage.

But you wouldn't know

because you only helped me the first season,

          (back when I knew nothing)

when the landlord wouldn't let us dig, so

we gathered buckets and dresser drawers from the alleys,

filled them with soil and seeds.

The neighbor woman watched us from her window and wrote poems

because she wanted to fall in love

like us, with earth lines on her knuckles, and rain

warm and misty,

setting seeds to bed better than any fancy hose-head.

But what I had to learn (and this was harder

than remembering that tomatoes

are a member of the nightshade family, or

that a potato is a stem, or that a pumpkin handle

is called a peduncle)

            what I had to learn

was that healing hides in years

of filing the pea packets in the folder marked Fabeaceae,

and in February afternoons spent bent over 

trays of earth, breathing peat 'til I sneeze, 

feeling lonely and complete all at once.