Dirt

The thing about dirt is that it is.

Dirt. When you’re planting raspberries, you want some, and with geraniums too, and maybe lilacs. Petunias. You get the point. The other thing about dirt is that it’s dirty and everywhere. Under your fingernails. Little clumps stuck in your armpit hair — tiny meatballs of dust, lint, deodorant and sweat. Dirt just lives. In yer belly button. Netherplaces. Between yer toes. Your BarcaLounger.

An early-years HSN cleaning product proudly claimed: “Cleans Everything But a Dirty Mind.”

How clean can a dirty mind get? How dirty can a clean mind be? (Sorry, JB … and if you get this reference, call in or e-mail Jana and I’ll give a hundred bucks to the first correct answer.) What’s the definition of “dirty”? In that context, is anything but “dirty” any good? Ask Mae West.

… Meanwhile, in Cleopatra’s day and hood, the dirt was yellow, ripe-wheat-colored. Sand insteada soil. And her baths and streets and buildings and sewers and aqueducts and doctors and musicians and pets and lovers (Marc Antony and Julius Cesar, for God’s sake!) knew the drill, everything covered in gold: Sand made different dirt than dirt. Sorta swimmy. Vanilla latte colored, not mucky.

Anyway …

Real Dirt is dirty. And everywhere. No amount of scrubbing will remove it. Boil yourself in bleach. Filet off all your skin. Scorch your bones in the sun for a thousand-million years. Spend a month in the Confessional, genuflecting, hoping. Praying. Dreaming? While your confessor does the same.

Eventually, knees bruise and become arthritic and standing is critical, like planting in May, dodging frost. And beneath and around everything and on it is the dirt, the mud and sand and sin and violence and addiction and happenstance and circuitry and benevolence and madness that shows up in the meadow across from the vacant lot in the spring along with the buckthorn and cattails and thrown-away tires and box springs and wood ticks and Everclear bottles, reminding you how beautiful everything is when it isn’t, but is, despite its being dirty.

Parnell Thill is a Cloquet-based author and marketing executive. Winner of a Minnesota Newspaper Association Better Newspaper Contest “Columnist of the Year” award in 2017, his book “Killing the Devil and Other Excellent Tricks” is available at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, local booksellers, the Pine Knot News office and at killingthedevil.com.