Saturday morning I am in the community gardens, down by the Wallkill River, hauling horse manure. Dumping it, cart load after cart load, in my 60' x 20' plot. At 53 I still out-haul every studly man and sturdy woman down there, and that's 170 gardeners in all. No mean feat. It's my technology.

I use a pole shovel, the long curved blade on an armstrong spade's wooden dowel, with a closed handle. Goes so deep. The manure -- thatched hay, damp, chopped, stained; interleaved with the acrid clods, the white dust of nitrates, and the darker unmentionable veins -- resists all but this slender blade.

I work the pile with an ordinary garden rake first, to make loosened stacks, then the shovel. The narrow 15" blade meets little resistance, and the raked material adheres into tall shovelfuls.

As the pile gets shorter I can crouch, my knees deep into Tai Chi bends, to scrape the remainder together in wide sweeping arcs, using the long edge of the blade like a trowel. Shaped into shovelfuls worth getting. Alway lifting with my knees, changing regularly from left to right leading hand.

I have done it this way for ten years: eight years on my acreage, before I sold it away, and for two years in the New Paltz Gardens for Nutrition, the oldest continuously operated public gardens in the US.

If you have read my other pieces you might be surprised to hear all this, given the sad-sack and brutal descriptions of my surgeries. I am, nonetheless a strapping Irish boyo, still very upper-body strong. I  handily out-shovel the most muscled, shirtless 20-somethings, poorly equipped as they are with those broad, dreidel-shaped spades. None of them seem to notice my preliminary raking, either.

I am methodical, consistent, in my motions; they exhaust themselves with the wrong tools. Pushing harder, faster, into that thick shit, with those flat blades, just makes it worse.

Young men are dopes.

I go slow hauling it back, through the long aisles to my plot. My re-constructed colon and my half-gone and dysfunctional sphincter both rebel, find surprising ways to insist, to cruelly remind. I have learned to walk just so, tilt and push and pause at dull-witted speed, behind that double weight of over 80 pounds in a wooden, thin-paneled box cart. Shh, my legs say to my nethers. He's just an old guy, they whisper, and keep it all quiet.

This of course fools those college kid humunculoids. They see me as some doddering greybeard, at least until we are shoveling side-by-side, them straining, gasping, me methodically filling. Their wrong impression makes my victory at the crap pile all the sweeter.

Back at the plots I think with my shovel. I drag it in lines, turning a curve, cracking turf to define a corner, wide-stance deep knee bends to shave trampled weeds, an inch below the dirt line. My brain, full of data architecture, file installations, team tasks, and client management for six days straight, is utterly switched OFF.

This is not an affectation or colorful phrase: I do, truly, think with my shovel. Time passes. Four or five alternate visions of the green beds-to-come morph one into the other, defined by my traceries limned in the loam.

I awaken after these reverie hours, to discover my own works, and the black earth murmers to me its intentions:

    I will be peas in Wings of Wire

    I will be heirlooms in Militant Rows, that stop just so

    I will be Mandalas and Pirouettes of kale and garlic chive and artichoke

    I will be Drifts of cool, flat stones to tread upon

    I will be labial Vee's of pungent onion, in a Wash of cilantro

My competitive beastliness is but necessary prelude to the beauty of my works. My works. Ha! The gardens transcend our paltry egos, when they reach dizzy-green mid-summer splendor, defying us to take any credit at all.

But, nonetheless, at the manure mound? It feels sooo good to leave them groaning in my wake.

^{(photography by Eliana Correll, all rights reserved)}