Nick Coleman: Digging for meaning in anxious times

I come from a line of people who eked out a living by menial labor in the old country and brought that habit here, busting sod in southern Minnesota in the 1850s. So I was feeling close to my ancestors the other day while I was emptying a wheelbarrow of dirt, tipping it up and giving it that good side-to-side shake to get rid of the last clumps.

I ended up clouting myself with one of the heavy handles, forgetting to pull my head clear of the work zone, getting a swollen ear.

Somewhere, I heard old Irish relatives laughing. Now the fool has smacked himself with a wheelbarrow.

During decades of office work, I often felt like slamming my head on my desk, but this was the hardest I ever bonked my head doing honest labor. It hurt good.

My sweetest early memory is of watching a fence being built in the back yard of a house on Dorothea Avenue in St. Paul, me fetching hammers and nails for my father and grandfather as they worked. I was only 4 or 5 at the time and remember few details, just the joy of working in the dirt -- me, my dad and grandpa.

I have built a few fences since then, each one better than the previous, each with a memory playing in my head of that fence being made on Dorothea. It still makes me mad when I think of a pretty white picket fence I built in front of a house in Rochester, digging post holes and sawing lumber in a cold October drizzle while listening on the radio to the World Series.

A few years later, the next owner tore it down. Vandals.

Men I have never seen bend over for anything are on their knees, digging and planting. Maybe it's the example of the Obamas, who put in a White House vegetable garden. But I don't think it's about politics.

It might be about the soul.

In a widely read essay in the New York Times last month, Matthew Crawford -- who forsook a doctorate in political philosophy to become a skilled motorcycle repairman -- argued that working by hand "answers a basic human need."

Crawford's essay, "The Case for Working With Your Hands," quotes from "To Be of Use," a wonderful poem by Marge Piercy that includes these lines:

"The pitcher cries for water to carry/and a person for work that is real."

I have spent my pile of riches on raised gardens while erecting new mounds of debris that will have to be hauled away, tearing out tough banks of gravel-ridden subsoil that crunch when you try to sink in the spade. I thought about buying a pick to make it go easier, but I wouldn't use a pick enough.

A man shouldn't let like-new tools hang in his garage for long.

I was closing in on the last of this year's yardwork just as Father's Day approached, my kids watching and lending a hand, the big ones fetching hammers, the littlest one playing in the shrinking pile of dirt. More memories made by hand.

"By God, the old man could handle a spade," Seamus Heaney wrote in "Digging," an elegy to his father and the beginning of his own life's work, excavating with a pen.

Right now, I can't think of higher praise a man might want to hear.