Soil & Shrubs, Ghosts & Spirits

According to master gardeners, there is no dirt and there are no bushes in my yard. What's out there, they have told me, is soil. And shrubs. I took a class in gardening at the community college to find this out.

I wanted to ask about the voices of children you sometimes hear on the breeze of an evening, voices that whisper through pine needles. It seems common enough until the children laugh. If I took a class in ghosts, I would be told without a doubt that I was listening to the spirits of children and not to the voices of ghosts.

Ghosts, I have been told, are earth-bound. Spirits are not. I wanted to correct the person who informed me of this and ask whether she didn't mean soil-bound if the ghosts were in the yard.

I don't know how far away heaven is. Has heaven been snatched from earth to float away free and never return? Does it drift further and further out to stay? Not to know where heaven is must sound foolish to smart people who know these things, but I think the place in which spirits dwell is pretty close to here. And if the home of spirits isn't earth-bound, there's a regular road that will have them here and back again. It's not a long walk.

I think heaven is tied to earth. Or earth is tied to heaven.

Ghosts who are earth-bound move around. I hear they get on trains all the time. And ships. Ghosts in the backseats of cars are certainly bound to go somewhere when the cars move along. So I don't think earth-bound means tied in one place. It just must mean that ghosts are here. Well, so are spirits.

Ghosts and spirits both to me are ghosts. I truly can't make up my mind between. Perhaps it's best if neither were heard and ghosts were never seen. That's not the case. When a spirit of someone dead drops by to speak to you in a dream or to say a pretty word or two when you're walking the aisle at the grocery store in that hat you put on because your hair is a mess, well hell, that's a ghost to me.

And my grandmother's yard has snowball bushes in it. They grow in the dirt by the stone wall and bloom in the spring. You can't talk her out of it.