It's not just dirt

A few weeks ago I saw a former student and his wife at Wal Mart. During our visit, we talked about where he lived in respect to where we are going to be moving.

His home is located in the Center Valley complex of roads. There's Center Valley Road, where my mother lives. There's South Center Valley Road where we're going to live. It runs north and south. Then, once you get to Center Valley Road, which runs east-west, you go for about half a mile, and you can turn on to North Center Valley Road, which runs north and south. How's that for confusing!

Anyway, when I told him where my mother and sisters lived, his wife popped up and said, "Oh, that's the place with the beautiful------here's most people say, "horses," ----but instead, she said, "manure pile." With 13 horses in stalls every night leaving deposits to be shoveled every morning, my sisters have amassed several impressive manure piles outside their barn over the years.

They've also passed along a lot of that rich stuff to folks looking for a good garden, especially in the Elmira area where real dirt is hard to come by in all those sand dunes. At the Tibbs Arabians manure pile, folks can shovel a load for free or pay five dollars for one of my sisters to use the tractor and front-end loader to fill 'er up.

They have their regular customers, and the past couple of years a Mr. Green of Elmira has spoken for most of the pile of fermented horse apples mixed with shavings. I've often been told by others who pass by on Highway 95 or who frequent the stable area that they love to see the poop pile in the early morning as it sends off its old faithful supply of steam into the crisp air.

So, yes, barnyard dirt is not just dirt. It's appreciated for a variety of reasons. Some of the most beautiful veggies and flowers in local gardens owe their success to a good infusion of the stuff. It also represents a nice segment in the cycle of life, whereas hay grows, horses eat, horses poop, and poop helps hay, beans and petunias grow abundantly.

Yesterday afternoon, we enjoyed a barnyard dirt session here at the Love house. Through the winter, especially on yucky days, our horses have stood inside a bay in our machine shed. During their many hours of standing, many hundreds of green alfalfa-timothy-mixed apples have fallen to the floor. A few weeks ago, I cleaned the area, which had turned into a manure carpet about four inches deep.

I shoveled the stuff and threw it out into the barnyard in front of the shed. So, when Jayne Davis called a few days ago and asked if we had any good dirt for a raised-bed planter they had constructed for her mother Verna Mae, I happily reported that we certainly did. And, since we would not be using it for our garden this year, she was welcome to have it.

So, yesterday Jayne and her husband Dave came armed with shovels and Dave's homemade multipurpose trailer (used for everything from manure transport to an elk-hunting cabin). By the time they arrived, I'd had time to run the rototiller through the Rambo-Casey deposits and work it up for easier shoveling.

Though our shoveling session centered around dirt, it also provided a good time to visit and catch up with school stuff and family news. Dave and Jayne were also treated to a horse show.

Rambo and Casey, being locked out into waist-deep grass and unable to get back into the barnyard from which they yearned to escape for so many months, pranced around and whinnied in protest. I told Jayne and Dave that was normal. Tell a horse or a person they cannot do something, and expect that very privilege to be precisely what they desire.

The horses eventually gave in and went back to eat more grass to produce more poop. Before we knew it, Dave was announcing, "That's enough." They had more than enough for Verna Mae's bed, so the shoveling stopped but the talking did not. We covered a gamut of anecdotes during our dirt visit.

So, as they drove out the driveway and I shut the gates to the barnyard, I figured Rambo and Casey's winter production yielded a lot more than flowers for Verna Mae's new garden. It also helped some old friends keep up with the cycle of life that we all enjoy before we start pushing up daisies ourselves.