My Empire of Dirt
How one woman was buried by the power fantasy of gardening.
Once upon a time, there was a simple little lady who kept a simple little houseplant in a simple little pot. She loved her plant dearly, gave it a name, and killed it instantly. Oops. Undeterred, she brought home a new plant. It somehow died faster than the first one. Now slightly deterred, she vented her frustrations by issuing a threat to all of plantkind in her bimonthly humor column, as one does.
Little did she know that this threat was actually a rite of passage. The initial loss process, it turns out, is an essential ritual of plant hazing, and not the kind they do for the organic produce at Publix. The plants themselves were testing her, to see if she could withstand the deluge of death and pestilence that is gardening.
Once she proved her mettle, she was bestowed with the forbidden gardening secret: It is healthy to neglect and mutilate your plants. They like it.
Armed with this arcane knowledge, she performed her first rites. She planted lettuce seeds, ignored them for two weeks, harvested that lettuce, ate it, and didn’t get salmonella. She rended a limb from her healthiest plant, put it in a stasis chamber (water cup), and watched as it grew completely new roots. Now I am become death, she thought to herself.
It was around this time that she began to change. She “drank the MiracleGro,” so to speak, and now lords over a vast serfdom of greenery—violets, marigolds, pinky-doos, gray glistenies, blue bois, polka dot pretties, and some genre of cactus. Each one lives because she wants it to, and dies because she may have forgotten about it over in the corner. And that’s not even mentioning the various weeds, pests, and diseases that are regularly obliterated by her hand. She is the decider, the defender, the sword and shield, and she knows it, for better or worse.
But great power comes at a great cost. In this case, that cost is literal: a hefty stake in the dirt economy. Back when her garden was naught but simple and little, she’d never have dreamed of spending money on, just, dirt. Now she devotes part of her salary to it. She composts her own garbage into dirt. She improves the quality of her dirt with different dirt. She even tests the pH of her dirt, but she thinks it’s to check if the earthworms are pregnant. She came to own far more dirt than plants, as she learned too late is the inextricable paradox of gardening.
The other thing about dirt is that it’s dirty—go figure. This fact is useless most of the time, but it sure did come into focus for our heroine last month when the entire world was freezing over. Her only options were to cart at least a dozen very full pots and beds inside to wait out the weather, or let her carefully cultivated kingdom be killed by something other than her. In other words, there was only one option.
This proved to be a timeline-altering event for two reasons. One, every last one of her precious subjects survived. Two, her dining room is now afflicted with a curse of infinite dirt in every crevasse of grout and fabric for all eternity. Now I am become dirt, she thought to herself. The End.
The moral of this story is simple: Absolute power corrupts absolutely. Also gardening is a scam by Big Dirt to sell dirt, and avoid having a bimonthly humor column.
