DIRT IN MY DNA

I am convinced there is a farming gene and it forms part of my DNA. For me, almost nothing surpasses the pure joy of green vegetable seedlings in early spring. Unless its the pencil-to-paper planning of that garden next to a cup of coffee and a snowy window. The annual miracle of pink peony tips or ground-hugging sedum rosettes seems to bring me more delight every year.

I am unique in my immediate family for this; my parents didn’t garden, and in fact my father ordered the two peach trees on our Niagara Falls city lot hacked to the ground the first time he found a worm in the fruit. Neither of my siblings grow plants; my sister’s son once said, “any hole my mother digs for a plant is a grave.”

Yet the more I probe into the ancestral lines, the more gardeners and farmers I find. Certainly my maternal grandparents loved the flowers, particularly roses, they grew in their tiny St. Catharines yard. And on that side of the family, my Hungarian great-grandfather and at least two generations of men before him were peasant farm labourers.

On my father’s side, though, farming runs back over 10 generations in some of the lines. My historical map of the Niagara peninsula is dotted with the squares I’ve coloured in, representing the acreages owned by various branches of the family starting in 1785.

I know that DNA testing can reveal the origins of all kinds of traits, of parentage, of racial origins, of propensity to various diseases.

Today I’m thinking that somewhere on the twisted strand that makes me who I am, there’s a marker for a girl who likes her hands in the dirt, coaxing forth new life, fresh food and beauty.