I love the dirt. Not the kind that gets inside my house, accumulating on the piano or dresser or baseboard. No, I love the other kind of dirt - the stuff that can get between your toes on a summer walk down a prairie road. The kind that accumulates in piles on the edges of fields or outside corners of houses. A cool, smooth thing that can be scooped up and then fall down slowly, snaking between fingers, and bringing quiet.

I can't explain it exactly. Perhaps it's that undeniable connection with nature that humans have deep in their DNA, or perhaps it's simply the need to play with texture, like a child with playdough. Perhaps.

Or maybe it's memory.

When I was a child, there was a dirt road just a five minute walk up the highway from our little plot of land on the Manitoba prairie. I walked that road a lot in the summers, stopping and starting and stopping again to touch the dirt, or watch the rabbits, or look up into the clouds. I was usually alone, and almost always barefoot. I'd stop when I reached the little hill that overlooked the creek, and then I'd sit and listen to the water in the culvert, or watch it wash over the whiteness of the rocks. The hill was man-made, an artificial build-up of land that protected farmers' fields from the possibility of flooding, but to me it was beautiful. To me, it was solitude and safety and stillness. It was a place where my mind could find quiet, and then speak.

I wrote a lot as I sat in that spot. I don't recall what I wrote about or if my writing was ever read. Sometimes I'd have a paper and pencil in hand, but sometimes the stories would simply flow through my mind as I sat in the prairie wind, powdered earth between my bare toes and water echoing below. So many stories were forgotten before I got back home to broken pencil leads and scraps of loose leaf, but then I'd make up a new one. There was always a new one.

There were things that were hard in that place where I grew up. Things that bite at my soul when I spend too much time remembering. So, I don't look around when my mind travels to that hill. I don't glance across the fields or down the highway where the other stuff lives. Instead, I stare at the tiny patch of earth around me. It's on my feet and under my nails. It's warm on my fingertips from the July sun, and it sits in the tangles of my hair, too few trees to stop the wind from dancing with long strands of auburn. I feel the prickles of grass beneath me and listen to the music of moving water, and that's when I let people I've never met tell me their stories. That's when I'm free.

There are more places like that now - hiking paths and corners of forests and still waters. Quiet places to stop and listen. Places my mind can travel to when my body cannot. And I’m forever grateful.