My daughter sunk above her knees into the snow over my garden. Somewhere, deep down, lies my garlic. Are you stirring, little white cloves? In your tender hearts, are green shoots stretching?

Bit by bit, the world changes. Starting with the soil, I’m searching for ten solid beacons of spring. How much better does the world get for children than mud?

The soil is the great connector of lives, the source and destination of all. It is the healer and restorer and resurrector, by which disease passes into health, age into youth, death into life. Without proper care for it we can have no community, because without proper care for it we can have no life.

— Wendell Berry, The Unsettling of America