Week Seven

Seamus Heaney's "Digging" is a poem that I can definitely relate to becaue I grew up on a farm. Most of our food came from our garden, and every year we spent time digging potatoes. I can still smell the "potato mold" from potatoes that rotted in the ground. Sometimes, when I dug deep into the soil, I would slice the potatoes in half. But most of the time, Daddy did the digging, and I filled buckets with the new potatoes.

The best potato harvest came after we raked cow and horse manure into the garden soil. Once the potatoes were all picked up, we spread them to cure on the porch. Later, Mama would fry the potatoes in an iron skillet. The fried potatoes tasted so good and made all our hard work worth it!

Heaney compares his father and grandfather's digging to his writing. I think he is proud of his ancestor's work and continues their tradition through his writing. Instead of a spade or shovel, Heaney uses a pen to do his digging for memories and words to express his feelings. After reading this poem, I believe he does just that.

Heaney values hard work and his Irish heritage that he writes about. Although he was only a young boy at the time, he must have watched his father and helped pick up potatoes just as I did when I was young. I remember how dirty my hands became after digging in the dirt, but I didn't mind. I thought it was a miracle to dig into the ground and find food.

Mama cut the eyes off the seed potatoes and stored them in a burlap sack until we could plant them. I loved walking on the cool ground behind Daddy's plow, dropping the round potato buttons into the deep furrows. But I hated the potato bugs. My sister and I had to flip them into a can of gas to kill them. Ugh! I hated that chore because my brothers chased me with the bugs. It seems funny now, but it was not then. Today, I still enjoy eating new potatoes.

Heaney also writes about his father digging in his flowerbeds. I also love to plant flowers and am always digging in my yard. I have many rose bushes, a few tomatoes, and several irises. When I was a child, we only grew vegetables, so I love to grow flowers now. I only grow a few tomato plants: one in a topsy-turvy planter and two in clay pots. Flowers are food for the soul. Their color and fragrance attracts hummingbirds and releases peace. The flowers and birds liven up my yard.

My favorite flowers are purple ones. I have purple irises, purple pansies, and purple mums. The pansies and mums will bloom during the cold months because they are perennials, and the irises blooms every spring. Both of my grandmothers were avid gardeners and had green thumbs. They could grow anything. My nanny could take a single rose cutting, put it under a glass jar, and grow an entire rose bush. She was amazing!

Writing about my grandmothers remind me of Heaney who writes about his father and grandfather working in the field. Heaney and I share a heritage that begins with soil and ends with a pen. Growing things and writing poetry are creative and theraupetic exercises.

But I have found there is one plant that I cannot get rid of, cannas. I have some yellow cannas that will not die. I have dug them up, gave them away, and still they come back. The plants are very invasive. Although the flower is pretty, I want to move them because the stalks are quite tall and resemble Johnson grass; however, they seem to love where they are, despite my efforts to move them.

Through the simple act of digging, Heaney identifies with his ancestors and redefines his own geographical space. The geographical constraints seem to free him to explore his own path. Yet, the Irish forebears leave footprints for him to follow through his poetry.

It is interesting to see how much our ancestors shape our identities. My nanny never drove a car or traveled far from her home, but she could sew a dress without a pattern and grow a beautiful garden with seeds she collected. My other grandmother raised nine children by herself and managed a six-hundred acre farm. The land is still in my family today.

"Digging" helps me to see how important heritage and family are. Heaney's ancestors were Irish, and their influence is seen in his poetry. The old cliche: the apple doesn't fall far from the tree, is true. We may think we are doing things a new way, but it just may be an old thing revisited. Regardless of what we do, we should do it with passion.