My elderly mother in law has always been somewhat fanatical about her lawn and gardening. Her lawn and flower beds are a huge priority to her and she frets and fusses all spring and summer about the various things that need to be done in the yard. Her green thumb has driven us nuts over the years, since much of what needs to be done in the yard requires us to help her in one way or the other. With work, family and our own home and yard to care for, caring for hers has often been a chore that we haven’t felt enthused about. She’s just over the top about this yard stuff. Yard, flowers, fertilizer, weeds, more weeds, mowing, trimming, endless watering, more mowing…. All summer long.

You just never know where you might find a source of insight about yourself and I was surprized to find mine through this eighty two year old woman’s appreciation for the most basic of things - dirt.

She’s getting older now and every now and then expresses a great deal of sadness with what she calls “the old body I’m trapped in.” She’s had hip replacements, knee replacements and most recently had a bar inserted in the bone in one of her legs. She’s still as ambitous as she ever was about the activities that she loves, but now she grieves about her limitations.

I’ve always wondered why she is so fanatical about that darned yard and until recently I just didn’t get it. Then one day as she was venting her frustrations about her aging body, she clued me in about why working in the yard was so important. She said she grew up on a farm and worked the fields from the time she was old enough to help out. As she held some dirt from her garden in her hand she said, “Working with this soil makes me feel like I’m home on the farm again.” Suddenly I understood. For her, that soil was full of memories and comfort. I imagined that when she was on her hands and knees planting flowers, she was really back on the farm. For just a little while, her parents were alive again and she was reliving what it felt like to have her memories of family come alive again.

I adored my father but after my parents divorced, he stopped being a father to me. I never coped with the loss of my father then. The pain that I felt was so devastating that I buried it and never really dealt with it as a child. I didn’t know how to.

When he was around, he would always take us fishing in the summer. He loved to fish and I loved fishing with him. These are still my favorite memories from childhood.

After he was gone, all I had left of him was my fishing pole. From the age of ten through fourteen, I spent every summer walking to various lakes and fishing by myself. Fishing was all I thought about in the summer. Most mornings I was up before sunrise and off to my favorite fishing spot, My mother in law made me think back to that time and realize that I wasn’t really ever fishing at all. I was a little girl looking for her dad and hoping to relive the times that I spent fishing with him. I was seeking comfort and I found it there.

When I was small, we lived near a railroad track. We frequently heard trains as they went by on the track but one day my father heard something that thrilled him in a way that I had never seen before. He jumped from his chair, grabbed his car keys and took off through the open field toward the track. He was gone for a while and when he finally came back, he didn’t say a word. He grabbed some paper and a pen and locked himself in his room. He was in there for hours. When he finally came out of the bedroom, he showed us a story that he had written. It was about trains. I always thought that that he wanted to be a writer and that was why he wrote that story, but I was wrong.

My father loved trains. His father was a railroad worker who worked his way up from section hand, which was a hard labor job, to railroad engineer. He drove the old steam locomotives. The sound that my father recognized and became so excited about that day was the sound of a steam locomotive’s whistle. My father wasn’t chasing a train at all that day. He was chasing his father. I wonder if for just a few seconds he found him that day. I wonder if in writing that story, he was really trying to forever capture that moment and the way it felt to be with his father again.

We can go home again. Home is a garden, a lake or an old steam locomotive. Going home fills the holes that life wears into our souls.