Once Upon A Sandy Loam

Grandmother's Story

Grandmother Twylah Hurd Nitsch, an elder with the Seneca nation, whose Seneca name is, Yeh-weh Node meaning "She whose voice rides the wind," tells this story of when her childhood connection with soil began.

"I wasn't old enough to go to school yet," Twylah, a vigorous woman in her early seventies told us, I must have been under five when I spent one whole summer digging a hole with a large spoon in the side of a bank near our house. I had to dig and dig because the ground was so full of roots and my goal was to make a hole big enough to sit inÑlike in a cave. And that took a lot of hard work. Digging through all those roots was tough.

"What I remember most about that experience is something my grandmother said: 'When you take the dirt out, make sure you have a place for it,' she cautioned me, 'because the dirt is used to being in that particular place, and it is at home there. Don't take anything that is part of something and just scatter it around. Remember you are disturbing the home of the worms and insects. You are moving them out of the place where they have been living, and you need to make sure that they are happy about where you are taking them.' So I would scoop the dirt into a little basket I had and take it around to various spots. 'Is this where you would like to be?' I'd ask. And if the answer was yes, I would leave it. Otherwise, I'd pick up my basket, go to another spot, and ask again.

When I had finally made the hole deep enough to sit in I would crawl in there and listen. I could hear the earth talking. I could hear the worms and the insects and other living sounds. They were my friends. And so were the stones. I had a little apron and I would gather the stones up in it, take them to my grandfather, and drop them on the ground in front of him. My grandfather was a medicine man and he would read them for me. The stones spoke to me. They still do. That summer was one of my first experiences of connecting with the sacred, and I remember it very well."