You can tell it's spring: clean garden gloves. Soon they will be brown, not yellow. Gloves know how to become one with the soil--they cover themselves with it. It sticks to them. It knits itself into their fabric. Even when washed, the gloves carry stains from the soil. Just last night I was reading Edward P. Jones's The Known World, in which the storyteller, a slave named Moses, tastes the soil at different times throughout the year. Each season has a different taste. But Moses doesn't taste the soil to find out what season it is. He tastes the soil to be come one with the land--a touching, true act that caused me to reflect on whether or not there are any ways that I try to become one with the land.

Some would say that wearing gloves separates me from the land, and I suppose it does, but sometimes we need protection even from the things we love the most--like sun and soil. Working the soil in the spring, whether with tractor or with the hands, is an act that brings us together with the land. Just now farmers are beginning to chisel plow their fields here in southeastern Minnesota. When they start to do that, I know I can pull on my gloves, grab a fork, and turn over some soil on my own. Maybe I work in some of the composted leaves I piled on last fall. Maybe I just need to do some aerating. Whatever I do, I will see the soil respond: in clumps if it is too wet, like raw oatmeal if is too dry, or like chocolate chip cookie dough if it is just right. When the soil can be packed together, but it contains different sized chocolate chip-like chunks and it can be rubbed between the hands and made to fall apart again, back into the bowl of earth, it is ready to be baked again into another tasty morsel.

I don't wear gloves when I make chocolate chip cookies--but I suppose I could wear those clear plastic food service gloves if I wanted to. I do taste chocolate chip cookie dough, however. Moses tastes the earth. I believe he is getting the better diet: Food for the soul. Maybe it's time for me to take off the gloves?