Digging

The last two Saturdays I've spent hours digging down at the allotment. It's back-crippling! But satisfying in a physical, visceral - dare I say it, down-to-earth - way. Clearing the ground, turning over the earth, getting it ready for planting and growing and harvesting. The act of digging, as well as laying down good preparation for the coming months, is also making me feel more in touch with the past. I remember my parents digging their enormous vegetable garden in rural Aberdeenshire, and being about 5 years old, following Dad as he dug up piles of potatoes, and helping to collect them in bags for winter eating.

Seamus Heaney wrote a poem called Digging. I think Dad might have shown it to me first; he thought a lot of it. He's about the same age as Heaney and from a similar background, and I think he felt a fellow feeling for the poet. Dad had an urban upbringing and Heaney a very rural one, but both came from in or near Derry; both went to Queen's University Belfast; both were academic and literary with a very non-academic family background. The poem contrasts the cerebral act of writing with the practical, useful, traditional skill of digging, perhaps highlighting a tension that Heaney might have felt between his chosen path and the way his ancestors lived. Dad certainly identified with this, and I've always connected the poem's narrator, and the act of digging, with Dad. And this year I've been making a connection with the more distant past, while starting to try and write down some of the stories about my Irish farmer ancestors, and thinking about how they lived and what they felt and said and did. All of them undoubtedly dug until their backs ached every spring. I'm just following in their (muddy) footsteps.

Here's my little patch of ground dug over and ready.