DIRT” IS A GOOD WORD. It goes straight back to the Anglo-Saxon and the Old Norse. Like “love,” “fuck,” “house,” “hearth,” “earth,” “sky,” “wrath,” and “word,” it is short, strong, and leaves a taste in the mouth. Therefore, even before you know what it means, you want to get ahold of it and chew it.
Many people would rather use the word “soil.” I met an ecologist in a parking lot one day, getting out of his car. He asked me what my book was about. “Dirt,” I said. The man scowled. “Soil, you mean,” he corrected.
“No, no. I mean dirt,” I insisted. “The stuff kids play in, the kind of road that begins where the pavement ends. Dirt.”
An Englishwoman said, “But dirt, well ‘dirt’ among us English is the word for . . . excrement. You know, as in ‘dog dirt.’ If you are not going to use ‘soil,’ then for goodness’ sake, use ‘earth.’ It’s more spiritual.”
“When I say dirt, I mean dirt,” I replied. “Earth” can be confusing, because to me it means the whole ball of wax. “Soil” sometimes strikes my ear as sexless and ugly. It makes the mouth taste of sour old nurses who complain, “Mr. A. has soiled himself again!”
It takes dirt to grow an oak from an acorn. It takes the rot and the shit that is the root meaning of “dirt"—dritten means “shit” in Old
Norse. It takes the hot and the wet to awaken the cool order of the mineral world.
Turds no less than rocks and roses are repositories for the energy of the sun. Dirt is where those three meet and meld, to transform the surface of the world and the air that we breathe.
Even into this century, when a country girl was going to be married in France, they fixed the amount of her dowry according to the weight of the manure produced on her father’s farm. And until quite recently, if you sold a farm, you always got a credit for the amount of compost that you’d saved. That is what I mean by dirt, the stuff of husbandry.
I mean the stuff that my father used to crumble in his hands and say softly, “That’s good black dirt, that is.”