Global Warming

You Need to Eat a Peck of Dirt in Your Lifetime

And Other Wisdom from My Grandma

Photo by GraphiDA on Unsplash

On Sundays, we went to Grandma’s house. Aunts, uncles, and cousins gathered to talk, play, listen to a ballgame on the radio, try to win a hand at cards, and of course, to eat.

We shared a pot of Grandma’s “Portuguese soup”, ladled over chunks of dense bread at the bottom of our bowls.The bread was there to help “fill us up” and to allow the pot of soup to feed the 15 or more of us crammed around the small table in the basement kitchen.

Those Sundays were times for the cousins to play pretty much unsupervised. We played tag and hide ‘n seek, running barefoot through the dirt and grass. We would climb the pear tree or the cherry tree, or crawl on our bellies to squeeze in under the front porch to hide.

Grandma had two grape arbors that produced masses of sticky, thick-skinned grapes. We cousins would lie in the grass under the grapes, squeezing the fruit out of the skins right into our mouths.

None of the adults cared if we got filthy playing outside, or if we ate the unwashed fruit from the vines and trees. Grandma’s philosophy was that “eating a peck of dirt” over your lifetime is what kept you healthy. About the only rule concerning being clean was that we…