this body built of the land
by g. leigh wilkerson

When my childhood friend Casey and I used to share a ride from Memphis back to our hometown in the hills of North Alabama, we'd wait for the feeling to happen.
Within 100 miles of home one of us would look at the other and say "I feel it." It was the body sensation of Home: some combination of memory, scent and texture that would make the heart sit up at attention. "I can feel it in my bones" I'd say. Casey said for him it was the way the air felt on his skin. Casey worked in a medical research lab and I was a nursing student and we would speculate on reasons for this deep feeling in the body of recognizing the ground of home.

We'd each seen our pets do the same thing. Approaching home, even by a route they¹d never traveled, his cat and my dog would know. My dog would jump up, sniff at the window with front feet on the door handle and begin to shiver with excitement. Perhaps scent alone could account for the animal reaction. For me, it was a deep body sensation, involving many senses, yet strongest in the very center—heart and belly. All added up to a poignant joy at being on home ground. Not the complicated family dynamics we each experienced, not the polluted small town of our birth, but the earth of home, the body of home.

Parts of us will always be built of the stuff of our birthplace. Our teeth contain mineral traces distinct enough to place us in a region. What Grandmother said about "you are what you eat" turns out to be true. Whether those building blocks are local minerals or heavy metals and toxins depends on the environment. My body will forever include the PCBs of my unfortunate hometown. It is not surprising that indigenous peoples are often passionate about environmental and pollution issues. When you plan for all your future generations to live on and from the same land, your fate and that of the land are married. When you plan for your grandchildren to be built of the very earth under your feet, you are hardly prone to pour chemicals into the soil or the river. My hometown did not think that far ahead.

After nursing school, fate led me and an old college friend on a summer adventure—as part-time interns at two organic farms—before we began our indoor careers in the fall. We were not your usual lanky 20-something farm interns, but rather two women in our 30s, overweight, with the most physical thing we'd done in years being dragging books home from the university library. Neither of us had ever gardened. We'd both lived for years in big cities, downtown even, and were far more accustomed to coffee shops than topsoil.

At the first farm, a small-scale organic daylily nursery, I was assigned to a lot of weeding. The farmer was cleaning up fields of flowers that had been neglected for years, so there was lots of hand weeding to be done before we put a thick mulch down. Eventually I came to enjoy the steady pace of weeding so much I would request the chore. One of us wondered aloud those first few days, if a little Round-Up might speed things along. The farmer looked slowly around the field and said, "You know, I wouldn't want to drink that stuff, and everything we put on the ground goes into our water supply." As she said this, her hand motioned in a big slow circle, encompassing the soil under our feet, the river nearby, the center of her body. The organic vegetable farmer we shared our time with would have probably put us on compost-tea brewing duty for the rest of the season at the suggestion of putting poison on our food, directly or indirectly. We knew better than to ask.

So to ground we went, squatting on little benches, nose-to-nose with flowers while pulling up clumps of weeds and wheelbarrowing them to the compost pile. For hours MC and I would sit and talk under sun hats to the rhythm of pulling weeds. Both farmers would spend long hours telling us how to know the land, how to grow things, how to learn from the soil.

There are unexpected gifts from spending that much time low-to-ground. I marveled at the architecture of flowers, like long-stemmed butterflies. My vision became sharper, alert to the antics of carolina wrens, of honeybee on bloom. I found out what the wings of small birds sound like as they flew over us. Even weeds had lessons to teach in their tenacity, their creativity to find a niche and sink deep roots before being discovered; or to be designed so that if they were torn apart, each fragment would grow a new weed. They carried messages to the farmers, who knew which weeds meant sweet, rich soil underneath, and which said poor drainage or low nutrients.

The light would change all day, as it has since earth was a newborn, yet I had never taken the time to watch. The mountain to our east, Pine Ridge, would shade from slate blue, to green, to lavender and finally the silhouette of black with a huge yellow moon rising behind her. Scents would drift across the field and envelop me—dew on soil in the morning, flowers in the midday. Later the water-scent of forest would seep down the slope and cool our skin. I'd never seen a myriad of stars; I'd never before felt dizzy from the depth of the night sky.

My body was falling in love with Open Ridge, the mountainside under my feet, even as I planned to return to the city. That summer we took turns cooking vegetables we'd grown ourselves, eating them together. Afterwards I'd retreat to my room barely after dark for the soundest sleep of my life. With the combination of physical work, fresh air and the natural pace, my body slimmed and strengthened, became alive, while my mind quieted. The vegetable farmer teased me that if I kept eating the food grown in this valley, soon I'd be made of the valley and would never want to leave. I remembered that every seven years our bodies have nearly rebuilt themselves of whatever we have eaten. The farmer was right. I couldn't imagine going back to the flat walls of coffee shops, the drone of cars, the low pinkish roof of city night sky.

This is what I learned: Everything we do to the land we do to our bodies, for our bodies are literally of the land. Our bodies remember and long for the nearness of earth. How could we have forgotten? For me, forgetting had come in decades of gardening only in the produce section of the supermarket, forgetting that all food comes from land, somewhere. My body partakes of the land, for better or for worse, with every bite and every breath.

Finding home is perhaps more intense for a person whose birthplace is saturated with toxic chemicals. The lawsuit settlement to the townsfolk of Anniston, Alabama for PCB contamination will never replace being able to go home. I recently read Janisse Ray's wonderful book, Wild Card Quilt, the story of returning to her Georgia homeplace to make a life there. I was startled to weep. I had never realized the grief in my body of losing home.

But stronger than that sadness is the feeling of a body making a new home. Through a series of events too synchronous to sound realistic, I ended up buying the very cabin and the field where I interned. My beloved partner, who drove up one evening that summer to have supper, now accompanies me in loving this land. We are learning to grow vegetables and buy the rest from a local CSA (community supported agriculture) so that our foods will be grown from the ground of this valley. We are settling in for a lifetime—this marriage of body to land and to each other, for better or for worse. Becoming indigenous. Growing the ground of home.

G. Leigh Wilkerson writes and speaks on nature and conservation. She works as a hospice nurse in Yancey County. For info on finding an organic subscription farm/CSA near you, see buyappalachian.org.
[ leigh@herwords.org ]