Expressway: The good earth awaits

I find myself jealous these days because my puttering days in the dirt around my old home are over.

Part of my sadness also comes from the realization of the brief time we all have on this planet, the books I haven't read, and the places I haven't yet seen -- you know, the whole pile of things that we regret not having done, the stuff we put into a corner and allow to lie fallow and say we'll get to, some day.

My thoughts were turned to the ticking clock and warm memories by Peter J. Zwerlein's "Expressway" article in the Feb. 25 Newsday. He took me back to the earth -- my little corner, a place we called home for 39 years.

My wife and I lived in Nesconset, a hamlet in Smithtown. We purchased that four-bedroom split ranch on a quarter acre in 1969 for the astonishing total of $30,000, and we paid the kingly sum of $385 a year in taxes. We put down $10 to hold the house until we could bring our parents back to have a look. That fecund plot joyfully produced a family with three children, a koi pond, green grass and my corner of paradise.

During our first winter, spring became a long-awaited event. I transformed piles of dirt through my labor.

Each year before the spring rains, I patrolled the grounds. The dirt spoke to me. It was mine and it owned me. I felt the dirt yearning for me to engage with it. I could smell its longing to be turned, planted, fertilized, and reorganized, and I took extreme pleasure in reorganizing it.

Terraforming, or terrace gardening, became my passion. And there I breathed in that yearly desire to get dirt under my nails and watch vegetables, flowers and shrubs grow under my care.

I can still feel the heat of the earth now, but it is different. Nesconset was only a passing way station in life. I left my plot of dirt to Joe, the gentleman who bought our Nesconset house. I left my catchall garden to him, as well as the junk garden filled with old shoes overflowing with flowers, a discarded toilet bowl draped in pachysandra, and so many wonderful, magical things that could hold flowers in that helter-skelter corner.

Now living in a condominium in Mount Sinai, I have miniaturized my gardening. My play dirt is dictated by a housing committee that allows me a postage stamp of earth -- basically the border space up to 20 inches from our home on one side and in back.

My goal is to form and shape it into something. I have learned the ways of pots and how to stuff plants, mostly flowers and grasses, into the soil. Each year I manipulate their minuscule home and change it into a passing conglomeration of colors and smells.

Thanks, Peter, for the opportunity to feel that warmth once again through this essay, though the winter still rests its weary head upon us. The daffodils are peeking their soon-to-be-yellow crowns out of the soil, and I look forward to my brief sojourn into the dirt in a couple of months. Planting means everything, no matter how large or small the plot.

Reader Sy Roth lives in Mount Sinai.