A glint in the clod of dirt, and I lift it out, a shard of glass, faux cut glass from what could be my mother's sugar bowl. Only hers is sitting safely in the kitchen, full of sugar. I slip the piece into a pocket, where it joins two chips of pea green china, remnants of some other bowl perhaps.

Old land, used land gives up endless treasures. We garden on old land; someone dug here before us, back to at least 1872, but likely earlier than that: a woman named Henrietta, her daughter, then came Frances (I think she went by Fannie) then Lavaughn (called Vonnie), then me. They had husbands, thus all the horseshoes and broken parts of tools, and children – a rusted toy motorcycle, a tiny porcelain doll — but the garden, I imagine, was theirs. Bits of bottles, canning jars, crockery, china and glass – all broken, all ending up in my garden. One of them owned a certain blue on white pattern china for I've found a lot of it. Five pieces of an earthenware jug appeared over several years in various places; it's all there.

This digging up of old land is a family thing. One spring, while the war raged, my father-to-be dug up a bedspring entwined in the sod of a Chicago Southside vacant lot. It was smack in the middle of his Victory Garden and wasn't going to get the best of him. By the middle of that July his corn and beans, tomatoes and cukes were thriving in the soil of that former dump, as he and my mom-to-be fetched me, their new nine-week-old baby, from The Cradle where I'd been waiting for new parents.

Five, six, seven years old and he showed me how to dig regular spaced holes to hold the bright little pansies, petunias and snapdragons, cut with a knife from their damp, wooden flats, to gently set each in its hole and fill them with dirt. This spring I showed tow little boys, my own real flesh and blood (yet surely descendents too of that lovely, gardening man who rescued me from orphanhood) to hold tiny onion seedlings between two chubby fingers, then twirl their long roots into deep, narrow holes.

At 10, 11, 12 my best friend and I dug up our own garden in our town's last vacant lot. We struggled mightily, jumping on the spade with both feet, all eighty pounds of us, to cut through nine inches of Illinois sod. Yes, the sod's thicker out there than Maine, but oh, no rocks, none at all! Our garden was perhaps 12-feet-square, and we had to haul water to it, but things grew — corn, beans, tomatoes, and cukes.

The main feature of this Maine soil, as everyone knows who gardens here, is rocks, stones, boulders, and ledge. When my 12-year-old son traveled with me to bury Dad's ashes in Illinois, he was amazed at the gravediggers' speed: in ten minutes they were down four feet – "the prairie," I explained. "It's why everyone left Maine."

This spring we're putting in our 44th garden on this very spot. Amazing that there's anything left to find. But pretty regularly up come the shards, nails, buttons, bottle caps, leather shoes (!!), plastic green soldiers (our era), shells, and bones. Oh, and bucketfuls of rocks.

I dig out the paths between raised beds, set the heavy hemlock boards (they come rough-sawn from Vikings, and I use a few new ones each year to replace the rotten, old ones), then walk the length of the bed, loosening the soil with the special English Spading Fork that I read about in an Elliott Coleman book. It's the only time I step on the soil in these beds, the rest of the year endlessly warning kids and husband, "Don't step in there!"

Now it's time for Uncle Elmo's cultivating fork. This enormous tool — long, long handle and six-inch tines — is clearly meant for someone serious about his garden. Uncle Elmo was such a man. I only knew him for a few years when I was a young wife from the wilds of Chicago's suburbs, and he (my husband's relative, though not precisely an uncle) a man of the Kennebec River with a homemade boat in every pond in the county. Elmo drank a bit, fished a lot, and, as I said, took his garden seriously. Family lore doesn't have much more to say about him; I remember him, small and dark, in his tiny house on Gage Street in Augusta. He had a sweet, little wife we called Aunt Annie, and they're both long gone. I love tackling the clods left by the English Spading Fork with Elmo's cultivator. It does a fine job on what that E.S.F. started.

The end of an early spring day, hands dry and bleeding from dirt and prickers and broken glass, fingernails broken and filthy, is as happy as I'll ever be. Digging in a garden is where I'm meant to be.