There is a sl ight chil l in the air on this Wednesday

afternoon, but I only just register it moments before

entering the garden. I have taken a rare hour off

from work; it is my birthday and I am in God's Little

Acre, the garden associated with the food pantry at

First Presbyterian Church in Woodlawn.

Once I get to work digging, the chil l doesn't mean

much. I warm up quickly. We have a few beds that

need to be prepped. This spring has turned out to

be over-busy, as happens too often, and as usual

the planting and prep work in the gardens has

suffered.

Greens have been planted but nothing else. I t has

been a cool spring so far, and I am in no rush to get

fussy pepper and tomato plants into this weather.

But there’s sti l l plenty to do, and we are behind

schedule.

I t’s hard for people who have a feeling for spring

not to take that feel ing too far. The season seems

overwrought to us when it’s real ly we who are in a

state of muted hysteria. We anthropomorphize

nature in response to the warming weather and the

evidence of another cycle of l ife everywhere. I t’s a

buffet that we just can’t avoid making ourselves

sick at time and time again. Many of us are, in this

respect, perpetual chi ldren, not learning our

lessons and genuinely shocked when the same

consequences manifest over and over again along

with the thaw.

There’s just one shovel at the garden today and it’s

got a flat edge; not my preference for turning the

soil in a bed that has been left to its own devices for

a season or two and is now compacted. I t’s also not

sharpened. Very few of the shovels I have used

were or are. When I get to hear the singing of an

edged shovel, it’s good fortune rather than good

preparation.

Aldo Leopoldo, in A Sand County Almanac, praises

the shovel and its work and suggests that its bad

reputation is owing to the ubiquity of dul l shovels.

Probably so, in part, but it is also the frequency with

which shovels are used to earn one’s bread - that is

to say, with which the task is not of one’s own

choosing. Diggers of ditches could easily be added

to the Bibl ical hewers of wood and drawers of

water.

But on this day, I am not among them. I spade this

earth and toss it across the bed because the soil

needs air and it is a job of my choosing to aerate it.

When I tel l my partner on this garden, Lisa, about

the soil , she immediately talks about taking a gas-

powered ti l ler to it - which, of course, is the sensible

response. I t’s a good thing for me that I ’m

surrounded by sensible people, or I would never

get much done. But I wouldn’t mind a dreamer or

two more. . .

And I continue to dig. Here on this acre, we work

according to our pleasure and our interest in

helping others - and our abil ity to be goaded by the

crowd that gathers around the growers on and off

throughout the season. I am less often goaded than

others, but I do sometimes feel anxious about

whether we have enough planting packed in.

I t was my intention to plant lettuce this afternoon,

but I become absorbed in the digging and in the

concomitant excavating. Farming in Woodlawn

involves a great deal of col lecting of bricks and

stone. Our vacant lots are not vacant at al l but fi l led

with history and the detritus of demolished

buildings. Beginning immediately after the riots that

fol lowed behind the assassination of Reverend

Martin Luther King, Jr. on Apri l 4, 1 968, at the

Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee, the city of

Chicago tore every building down in Woodlawn it

could get its hands on for decades. Lots of pieces

of those buildings then got buried in the land, a thin

layer of dirt thrown over the pile. The demolition, if

not the cavalier disposal of material , sti l l continues

today, but with less of a frantic pace.

In neighborhoods in Chicago like Woodlawn, it can

often feel l ike we are sti l l struggl ing against those

decades-old memories, as if any positive plans are

rejoined with “Yes, but the riots . . . ” When King was

murdered, the whole country should have been

furious. I f we all hungered for peace the way we

say we do, maybe people in Woodlawn and other

South and West Side neighborhoods - and in D.C. ,

Baltimore, Louisvi l le, Kansas City and elsewhere -

would not have felt the need to riot. Or maybe we

would remember that week differently, at least. A

l ittle more deeply.

Like Leopold, I love the song of the shovel. Unl ike

him, though, I have only known it rarely. We have

been teaching ephemeral lessons here better than

enduring ones. As a result, we don’t sharpen our

shovels, among other neglectful acts. I t’s easy to do

less in precisely that way, especial ly in this place

and in this time. We are often praised here for doing

just a l ittle when, by doing so, we sometimes block

the way for someone who might do a lot more.

I bel ieve growing is deeply l inked to peacemaking;

it is perhaps the earl iest and most basic human

activity identified with reducing violence in our

everyday lives. There is a reason we refer to

cultural development as something we cultivate; it

is so perfectly true that a second meaning grew

alongside the first unti l we don’t real ly think about

why we say a person of sophistication has

cultivated that quality.

I don't know how God's Little Acre got its name. I t

seems unlikely that Sterl ing, the man who has

farmed the lot for the last 37 years and rules it,

would have coined that phrase first. His views on

rel igion are pretty skeptical.

I t is more likely that when he arrived to help the

congregants of First Presbyterian Church, who first

released the soil from the bricks and stone blocks

buried in it (or vice-versa), it had already been

named by one of them. I t had been their intention to

grow food here; it could not have been in anybody’s

mind that the young man from Tennessee who

quietly lent a hand would be the last of the group to

do so four decades later. I f we are now able to grow

for the pantry on this land, it is in large part because

Sterl ing kept that long-ago dream alive for so long

that the church was able to return to it a few years

ago and we were able to start planting here.

Riots and wrecking balls: how can tiny seeds stand

up to forces l ike this? Well , right away they do.

Violence tends to exhaust itself (though modern

warfare is working hard to overcome this).

Meanwhile, everyplace in the world, there are what

are called landraces, varieties of plants adapted to

the unique conditions of specific areas. Around

here, we call these weeds most of the time, but

they are the guarantors of a perpetual natural

presence in places where human beings, in our

infinite fol ly, have not made a place for nature.

I pul l a bunch of bricks, one large block, and most

of a tire out of the ground as I dig the bed - a

characteristical ly urban harvest. The earth is too

much clay; it wil l need some sand. I should bring it

and work it in before we plant, but I am hurried

most of the time these days.

Not here, though. Not today. Here I dig earth unti l I

see the time has passed when I should be home.

The shovel feels good and sl ides smoothly into the

dense, compact dirt. As I smooth out the parts of

the bed I have dug, I can feel the difference in the

earth, the room for plants to breathe and grow. I dig

a l ittle more, then stow the shovel and a couple of

other tools I pul led out and head out of God’s Little

Acre.