1.1.2024

Digging

Seamus Heaney

Between my finger and my thumb   

The squat pen rests; snug as a gun.

Under my window, a clean rasping sound   

When the spade sinks into gravelly ground:   

My father, digging. I look down

Till his straining rump among the flowerbeds   

Bends low, comes up twenty years away   

Stooping in rhythm through potato drills   

Where he was digging.

The coarse boot nestled on the lug, the shaft   

Against the inside knee was levered firmly.

He rooted out tall tops, buried the bright edge deep

To scatter new potatoes that we picked,

Loving their cool hardness in our hands.

By God, the old man could handle a spade.   

Just like his old man.

My grandfather cut more turf in a day

Than any other man on Toner’s bog.

Once I carried him milk in a bottle

Corked sloppily with paper. He straightened up

To drink it, then fell to right away

Nicking and slicing neatly, heaving sods

Over his shoulder, going down and down

For the good turf. Digging.

The cold smell of potato mould, the squelch and slap

Of soggy peat, the curt cuts of an edge

Through living roots awaken in my head.

But I’ve no spade to follow men like them.

Between my finger and my thumb

The squat pen rests.

I’ll dig with it.

Seamus Heaney, "Digging" from Death of a Naturalist. Copyright 1966 by Seamus Heaney.

We moved back to my hometown eight years ago. The house we’ve lived in that whole time still feels like my grandmother’s, not mine. The land surrounding it feels like the family farm, not my backyard.

Why do I still feel like an outsider here? I’m sure some of it is that this house and this land is just hardwired into my body as my grandmother’s. When the floor groans at the threshold of the living room I instinctively anticipate my grandmother to walk into the room. Not my wife, or my child. When I walk in after a few days away, the smell of the cabinets by the door smells of her life, not mine.

Yet, I don’t think this is why I still don’t feel comfortable calling this my home. Deep down I don’t think I deserve to call it home. I’m not earthy enough. My hands are too smooth. This is obviously silly to think, but think it I do.

Like Heaney in his poem Digging I look out my window and I see the land worked by my father and his father. I see the fruits of their labors. While I sit in my chair, keyboard beneath my fingers, with nothing to offer apart from the occasional interesting observation. Maybe a decent meal every now and then.

Seamus and I still dig though. He slicing through the human condition with his pen. Me…making spreadsheets?