Buried Treasure
Unique find spurs newfound love of potato planting.
March/April 2008
Bill Vossler
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Illustration by Michele Tremaine
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As the plowshare peeled back the soil, I fumbled in the syrup pail at my belt for seed potatoes, grasped a handful, some newly cut and slippery wet, and stepped reluctantly into the fresh furrow. The rolling soil stopped moving just before I plunged pieces of potato wrist-deep into the cool earth at the base of the furrow. Roots and stones chafed uncomfortably against the backs of my fingers. I didn’t want to be doing this. I so wanted to play baseball with my friends instead. I felt my mother eyeing me, probably to assure that I wouldn’t bolt.
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Dutifully, I stepped, plunged, stepped, plunged, planting each potato a foot farther down the furrow from its fellow, my arm a steady piston. The maw of black soil gobbled up the white pieces until I reached the edge of my planting zone, which was marked with a lath pounded in the ground.
While the gray Fordson tractor paused at the far end of the furrow, snatching its gleaming plowshare out of the dark earth so it bounced like a winded beast heaving breath, I glanced around and examined the long garden. It was dotted with members of my family, 30 feet apart along the ruler-straight furrows, eyes narrowed in concentration, hands hidden inside pails, poised to pounce, for if there was anything we knew how to do well as a family, it was to work.
The soil was burnished bright by the plowshare, indentations in the furrow marked newly planted potatoes, earthworms twisted on the sloped ground, and everything seemed usual on that spring morning when I was 12. Nothing indicated that this would be a morning of mornings. I smelled the sweet musty odor of the earth, of life itself, that connected me to generations of family who had come before. I wondered if they had been as bored with planting potatoes as I was.
The roar of the Fordson brought me out of my reverie. Backing up full-tilt, one tire in the furrow, the tractor leaned drunkenlike when it passed, its fan a blur as it slapped my face with engine-warmed air. Once the tractor reached the start of the furrow out by the sidewalk, it paused as though pondering its role, dropped the plow and lurched forward once again.
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