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The Ground Between Us
- Crimson Steed
- 3 hours ago
- 5 min read
Chapter 3
What the Land Taught Me
The road home from the crossroads was quiet. The quiet that settles in after truth has been spoken. The gravel crunched under the tires as I drove, the hum of the engine steady and low. My mind wasn’t on the road in front of me. It had wandered…somewhere deep in the red dirt of memory.
GG-Lucielle’s voice has a way of doing that. Just when you thought you had left a story behind, it would rise again like the sun over the fields. Bright, persistent. Impossible to ignore.
I hadn’t thought about those afternoons in years. Back when I was small enough to sit cross-legged on the porch while we shelled peas into metal bowls. Back when the land felt endless and grown folks’ conversations went right over my head.
But now, as I am driving away from the crossroads, her words came back clear, as if she were right beside me.
“Baby,” she used to say, “land remembers.”
At the time, I didn’t understand what she meant. I do now.
We would be in the fields planting crops. GG-Lucielle taught me that certain crops grow best in certain seasons than in others. You had to respect the timing of the land. This particular morning, we were planting potatoes. It was still wintertime, but it wasn’t cold. The sun was up and had been for some time. I can hear GG-Lucielle again.
“Baby, as you get older, listen to this land. This here land has a lot to say.”
She pressed her hands into the dirt like she was visiting with an old friend.
“This land has seen a heap of things. Folks tried to erase the songs from it. The spirits that grow these crops. Their hands dug in this here dirt when machines couldn’t. Not because they was broken, but because we weren’t allowed. This land remembers the stories of its first people, even if we’ve forgotten them."
I remember looking down at the mound of dirt in front of me, and my hands were already red from the dirt. I was doing my best to copy the way GG-Lucielle tended the row. She moved with intention. I could see that she had been doing this for a long time. The way she would dig into the whole, reach into the dirt, and come out with a potato. Then she would put a new seed potato in its place. Quickly, she would move on to the next one. Nothing wasted.
I kept digging, turning the soil the way she showed me, not realizing then that she wasn’t just teaching me how to plant potatoes. She was teaching me how to listen.
The dirt was cool to my palms, soft but strong. When I pulled one of the potatoes from the ground, it felt like uncovering buried treasure. I brushed it off on my apron, proud of what I had found. GG-Lucielle laughed when she saw the look on my face.
“Go on and put it in the basket, baby,” she said, nodding towards the wooden crate sitting between us.
I placed it gently with the others. They were rough and dusty. Still covered in the dirt that raised them. For a while, we worked in silence. The only sounds were the wind moving through the trees and the quiet flow of our hands in the soil. It was the kind of silence that didn’t feel empty. It felt full. Like the land itself was speaking in a way that didn’t need words. After a moment, GG-Lucielle straightened her back and wiped her hands on the front of her apron.
“Most folks think food comes from a store,” she said. “But everything you see there started somewhere like this.”
She gestured around the field.
“Right here in dirt, someone cared enough to tend.”
I followed her gaze across the rows of soil. Back then, it just looked like work to me. Rows to dig, weeds to pull, baskets to carry back to the house. But GG-Lucielle saw something more.
“This land fed people when there wasn’t nothing else,” she continued. Fed families when times got hard. When money was tight, and doors were closed.
Her voice softened, but there was strength in it.
“When the world told folks they wasn’t worth much…. this land still answered when they called.”
I didn’t fully understand what she meant. Not then. I just kept digging. The sun had climbed higher in the sky, warming the backs of our necks. Sweat gathered along my hairline and trickled down my temple. My arms were starting to ache, but I didn’t dare complain. Working beside GG-Lucielle felt important, even if I couldn’t explain why. She bent down again and pulled another potato from the ground.
“See this?” she said, holding it up between her fingers.
I nodded.
“This little thing been down there growing the whole time you couldn’t see it.”
She dropped it into my palm.
“Some things take patience, baby. You can’t rush what the land is doing underneath.”
I rolled the potato around in my hand, brushing away the dirt.
“Same way with people,” she added quietly.
At the time, I thought she was just talking about crops. Now I know better.
Years later, I would realize that GG-Lucielle wasn’t just teaching me about planting seasons or harvest time. She was passing down something older than either of us. Something that had traveled through generations of hands that worked this same soil.
Lessons about patience. About survival. About listening to what the land remembers when the world tries to forget.
Back then, all I knew was that I loved being out there with her. The smell of the dirt. The sound of birds cutting across the sky. The feeling that the land was alive in a way I couldn’t quite explain.
Even now, I can still see her standing there in that field, sunlight resting on her shoulders, hands strong and steady in the soil. Like she belonged to it, and it belonged to her.
The gravel under my tires pulled me back to the present. The road stretched out ahead of me, long and familiar, cutting through fields that looked much the same as they did all those years ago. But I wasn’t the same.
I understand now what GG-Lucielle meant when she said the land remembers. It remembers the hands that worked it. The prayers that were whispered over it. The stories that are buried beneath every harvest. And the people who carried those stories forward.
As I drove on, I realized something that hadn’t fully settled in before. GG-Lucielle wasn’t just teaching me about the land. She was making sure the land would always live in me.
Crimson Steed is a reflective writer and contributor exploring faith, transition, womanhood, and the sacred rhythms of growth. Her work centers on spiritual insight, emotional honesty, and the quiet wisdom found in seasons of waiting and becoming. Her reflections invite readers to release shame, honor the process, and trust divine timing.
Connect with her on Instagram, Facebook, or LinkedIn.
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