I jump with my muck boots to the shovel’s step With this blade I hit rock With that I sink delightfully down Lever out that sound Rhode Island grade A agricultural earth Into my wheelbarrow. With untold hours My middle aged wrists freeze up My fingers, callused and scratched and prearthritic, look to me like good working hands And I realize Hashtag lifegoals That I always wanted to have tough old lady hands To go with the long silver braid I saw on an old lady zipping her bike down Commercial Street in Provincetown When I was a little girl. My blood vessels pop My back and legs ache I’m smeared with good brown dirt I’m saving earthworms Even the huge ones that came from Asia. I stop Squat Pinch them gently Fling them into the grass I dig again. I am dazzled that I can move so much earth From here to there My wheelbarrow, my shovel, my headphones, My Hypsteria mix. Bees, ping pong balls with wings Circle my legs I dig and haul and dump and I don’t want to stop Sometimes, in the back yard, I hit rocks. I fling them into piles. I have piles of shale, puddingstone, granite, red ones, yellow ones, purple ones, blue ones The voles live in the piles The wolf spiders live in the piles We even had a rat, But the red tail got it. Sometimes, I hit a boulder It’s like Christmas It’s like my birthday I work on until I have to go make dinner I fall asleep thinking about my boulder How far does it go? How much does it weigh? What glorious colors will show when I pull it out and hose it off? The next day I run out and dig some more, and it is a beautiful rock. I will have this rock. I will not stop, though I am making a five foot hole in the back yard. And when I find the ends of my boulder I grunt and yell and lever it over and over and over again with shovels and boards and ropes, until it bookends my raspberry patch. My God, I love rocks so much. The glaciers came pushing them down from Canada, and then the farmers who tilled the fields behind my house dumped them all in the back yard and covered them with lawn. I am undoing their hard work, by hand like they did, making new use of northern rocks. I am earthmoving with the last decades of my strength, so that when I am old and I have made myself arthritic and creaky I can sit in my chair and look at my mounds and boulders and all of the growing things that run over them. --Dawn Emsellem