A dirt devil becomes an earth angel

By the time the Easter morning church service was over, sunshine had burned through clouds and fog. Temperatures were mild, and there was the slightest breeze from the southwest off the bay.

I couldn’t eat lunch quickly enough, compelled as I was to get outside and examine signs of spring. William Wordsworth’s sonnets rang in my ears, “Open unto the fields, and to the sky; all bright and glittering in the smokeless air, never did the sun more beautifully steep in his first splendour, valley, rock, or hill; ne’er saw I, never felt, a calm so deep.”

I couldn’t breathe the air deeply enough while I hunted and pecked in the flower beds, like a robin in search of buds on the lilac bush or green shoots poking up through the bare ground.

I moved the snowblower out of the way in order to roll the wheelbarrow from the garage toward a pile of compost left over from last summer. Shovel after shovel, I spread the rich, brown soil over the gardens, to be soaked in by Monday’s slow rain.

Though I worked furiously all afternoon, raking, digging, moving rocks, it was with Wordsworth’s “calm so deep,” brought about, no doubt, by Easter’s promise of rebirth and renewal.

I felt it in the energy with which I labored, and I heard it in the songs of Middle English lyrics: “With love is come to town the spring, with blossoms and birds whispering … Away is all their winter woe when up the woodruff springeth. A thousand birds are singing gay of winter’s sadness passed away, till all the woodland ringeth.”

The earth smelled sweet and clean, and I couldn’t seem to keep my gloves on. I wanted to feel the dirt in my hands, to pat it gently around the hydrangea bush and to mound it up where the peonies are sleeping.

An enormous spruce tree near the driveway had been cut down earlier this year, its limbs chipped into a heap 5 feet tall. The woody aroma was intoxicating to me, as if I had inhaled strong incense, while I loaded wheelbarrows full of the chips and shoveled them into layers of mulch here and there.

I removed mounds of brush that had protected the delphinium and rose bushes all winter, the cedar and fir branches smelling as fresh as the day they were laid across the beds.

It was all I could do to keep from putting my face into the soil like a child at play in the sandbox.

Call me earthy; call me an earth mother, whatever. But Easter afternoon I felt as though I were an earth angel.

Most other days, admittedly, I’m more like a dirt devil.