My garden space was the worst place in the world to plant a garden. The garden site was sloped so that if I turned over the soil at all, I risked losing the bit of fertile soil there was with the first rain. Digging into the minimal topsoil, the shovel would crunch into rocks covered with a sticky red clay. The site was so bad that I considered buying some type of large containers to fill with topsoil and put the garden plants in them instead of in the ground. Then I thought that would become too expensive, for the number of containers I would need might be more than one hundred, so why not turn the clay soil into ready-made pots in the ground and fill the holes with fertile ground. I dug holes about two feet deep, and when the digging got especially rough I would fill them with water and let it soak in for a while. I used all the big square rocks that I could find to terrace the slope a bit. It turned out to be a pretty good idea.

I began the task, but it was really strenuous. Sparks would fly every time I unexpectedly struck a rock with my shovel. I would often have to pry the rocks out of the tough, sticky clay. I worked at it all spring and summer, usually piling the debris in small heaps throughout the garden, the summer heat making me lazy about carting them out in a wheelbarrow.

As the spring and summer rains began, the clay slowly washed off from all the rocks, and I began to think some of them looked peculiarly like fossils, but who would ever think that untold eons ago, some process, maybe a melting glacier, would dump so many proofs of ancient life right there, right where millions (Dare I guess how long ago?) of years later I would try to grow tomatoes?

One day, I picked up what looked like a thin slice of shale and dipped it into a bucket of water to clean off the last remnants of dirt. There, looking right into my face, was an unmistakable face of a creature who had once been alive, however long ago. There it was, grinning, ghost-like, back at me, with obvious mouth and eyes, and maybe a glob was once a nose.

After that, my garden began to look more like an archeological dig than a proper garden. The tomatoes grew beautifully too in their underground containers.