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I was forcing, chasing and trying to will it to happen. Needless to say, I was gravely mistaken to think this was the way. There’s something about sitting in the dirt, feet out–toes done or not–and sitting your ass still. Maybe it has something to do with my earthiness, but my way is to find where the dirt is.     

 

I feel most connected to my dirt in the bathtub at 361. I scrub up and down, twist so that the water ripples, and rest my head and hands wherever they want to go. The bathtub was purchased especially for my mom and I to use even though it is sometimes taken over by two little bodies, ninja turtle toys and a few drops of green food coloring. It’s personal, this dirt. It doesn’t carry the memories of anyone else. I dumped bags of ice that I carried from down the block into that tub. I’ve cried and yelled and breathed deeply in that tub. And now every time I lay down in it, a new experience unfolds.     

 

I’ve thrown “dirt” around—pun kind of intended—and this is my personal definition: “Dirt” is the space that carries your who’s, what’s, and whys. Regardless of its external presentation, the energy and essence of your past lives and breathes there. It is peppered with your most formative experiences. It is sprouting with thick, unplucked weeds, waste, and seeds that have grown full whether we like it or not. The dirt requires your return. It requires reintroduction to the ground. It requires your tending to, a reinvigoration of this easier, and sometimes, seemingly better forgotten place.     

 

Hearing the words and stories of the women of the project, many of whom are family—blood or not, it’s the same game for me—made me reflect on the nature of my dirt. They provided me with some of the whys.  They are the who’s of my dirt and the what’s of this project, which has ultimately been a quest for self actualization. The so called ‘work’ I was doing over the summer was ‘play’ wearing a cloak of tension and acceptability. With each passing conversation, the ground from which we all came and some of us still remain, despite some of the nuances, was enriched.  It was nurtured by our conversation and nourished by our self-definition. Some women of the project talked about an internal, figurative dirt space, others of them provided an address. I gave you a space made by the memories, time, and everyday culture cultivated over the years.     

 

Before coming home for the summer, I was in desperate need of dirt. At that point, my everything was in shift and I was learning to trust myself more than anyone else. In other words, I was in what felt like the dark mainly because I was operating in a space that had lay dormant. A house but not a home. It was a space, but not a place. I hadn’t made it so yet. It was underdeveloped and unfamiliar. I didn’t begin this project to develop the space, at least not consciously. I embarked on a journey with the women of the project and on a journey both with and for self. For a while, I treated these as mutually exclusive undertakings, but the two conflate more than I was able to foresee when I settled on the idea that was equal parts “I can do this in my sleep” and “what the hell do I think I’m doing?”     

 

My grandmother was in the process of designing the bathroom that I now cherish so deeply in preparation of my mom and I’s homecoming a little later that year before she passed. In light of the transition by our forewoman, my mother came back to her dirt whether she wanted to do so at that moment or not. I’d argue that it was time even if she wasn’t ready to get dirty.     

 

The point is that our dirt will follow us in light of death, at which point we may feel robbed of our right to choose to explore. It will call us home when there are other places we’d prefer to be. It will bring us back to answers we didn’t want and all that we didn’t know we needed. Dirt is where the truth lies, and the courageous will go in search.

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