Heaven in a Grain of Dirt?
Nashville writer takes ‘bloom where you’re planted’ to a whole new level
by Laura Hileman
“As a general rule for gardening and most other things,” Benson observes, “I recommend you keep your tools handy—something new is always coming.” Much of what’s new in the yardscape involves the fence that Benson puts up to define the boundaries: who’s in and who’s out, what’s on his canvas and what isn’t. It’s a horrifically complicated ordeal with about a million spindles to carve and paint and cap with copper. He and his kids work at it for 18 months, but once in place, it never stays put for long. A car accident takes down part of it days after completion. Then a new plan calls for moving panels to accommodate an iron fountain. Like a comic refrain, more fence restructuring is inevitable with the appearance of the studio, then with Mr. Shrub and the Bobcat driver, followed by the plunge pool and Sammy the backhoe guy and a new set of plumbing. Eventually a fence emerges that, like a gracefully maturing character, begins to embrace more than it excludes. For Benson, tending the backyard self can mean opening it up to impromptu gatherings of all kinds of likely and unlikely folks. By the end of the book, even the Wheelbarrow Man, that benign thief whose plunderings prompted the fence building in the first place, would probably be welcome.
Benson writes primarily about spiritual matters, and Digging In is the best of his not-strictly-religious works. It’s also one of those quietly artful books that makes you think, “I could write that.” And maybe we all should craft a memoir of some sort. Not because the world needs another memoir, but because the world needs people who are willing to take up their tools and tend the sacred ground of their own backyard lives, digging in to “tenderly recall the places we come from…appreciate where we are, and …clearly see who we may yet become.”
