By Beverly Faxon

Not long ago, on a gray day with a steady, percussive rain, I suddenly yearned to bake bread. I wanted that toasty bread baking smell, and I wanted bread’s buttered, yeasty warmth to be my reward at dusk.

And I only half knew it, but I also wanted to feel the dough smooth out and take shape beneath my hands. It has been years since I’ve baked bread. What is the need, when life is busy, and bread baking requires hours at home, and our valley has so many good bakeries?

The need, it turns out, is in the kneading. The rhythm of turning, and rocking, and pressing the dough returned to me without effort, and with great pleasure. My brain wasn’t required, only my hands. Indeed, my brain drifted away, and the bread dough and I, unhurried, made our way.

I was once told that, when I find myself distracted, I might just look at my hands. This simple advice has worked well. I am brought back into the present by leaving my mind, with its stories and hindrances, out of it and instead watching what my hands are doing.

A friend who tutors preteen boys tells me the boys have a difficult time writing—their fine motor skills seem underdeveloped. The jury may still be out on the relationship between our devices and fine motor skills—surely all that texting requires much of our hands—but it seems possible that the way we mostly use our hands is, at the least, both repetitive and limited, the difference between the pressing of keys and the stretching, curling, and pinching required to thread, or knit, or knead, or glue, or dig, or stack.

“Touch me, remind me who I am,” wrote the poet Stanley Kunitz to his wife when he was 85. If being touched can bring us back to ourselves, the same is true of touching. I recently read that our palms’ relatively small surfaces contain about 15% of our tactile nerve fibers, capable of feeling something as spare as a spider web. From infancy, I was reminded, we find our way in the world by exploring with our hands.

My gray day of bread baking is yielding to the sun of spring—an easy time to leave the head behind and see the world with our hands. The fur-tipped ears of pussy willows beckon, as do the satin petals of tulips. We part floppy, veined rhubarb leaves to grab the stalks and pull for pie, and we run our thumbs over the nubs of new asparagus. We brush against nettle and are brought to ourselves as surely as Kunitz was—we know who we are, fools who carelessly jostled against a stinging plant.

The earth calls, and nothing is more grounding than hands in the earth. Some studies have suggested that working in soil is good for our physical and mental health on a gut level—by increasing the amount and types of microbes in our intestines.

This makes sense to me, but then, I have always found myself soothed by the feel of dirt, of sand, of clay. I like to sift, I like to dig, I like to tunnel. Put me on a beach, or in a garden, and I am happy for hours. In my grandparent stage, even a sandbox will do—I like to get right in there among ‘em for the soothing repetition of packing and burrowing.

If hands touching earth is grounding, then gardening is especially so: cold April soil warming up in the sun; the grit and grain of dirt sifted over seeds; the seeds themselves, from tiny self-sufficient orbs to bits of hope feathered, spiked or kerneled. The grasp and satisfying tug on a weed. All leading to the summertime palming of a fresh tomato, the stripping of corn off the stalk, the freeing of peas from pods, the gathering of dahlias.

I first saw dahlias in abundance at Seattle’s Pike Place Market in the early 80s—big bunches wrapped in white paper in early fall. I loved then the red poms—an armful of cheer the color of Taylor Swift’s lipstick. But there are dahlias spiked and frilled; dahlias with gentle, modest curls; show-off dahlias called dinner plate, because that is their size. Dahlias bronze and dahlias purple, yellows soft and yellows brassy, creamy whites and sunrise orange-pinks not seen elsewhere in my garden. I don’t know if this is common to all dahlias, but the colors of mine change not only over a single bloom’s lifespan, but over the course of the season. I’ve seen a July clump the red of a kid’s crayon give way to the September orange of a 60s back-to-school miniskirt.

When it comes to keeping my hands busy and my mind quiet, I’ve become a believer in the small cutting garden—rows that become unruly with spilled blooms as summer goes on; no need to honor landscaping; lots of blossoms to cut and share. I stick to what grows easily in my soil and share of sunlight—sweet peas, cosmos, larkspur, borage both for the bees and so I can pop those tiny blue flowers out of their fuzzy caps and sprinkle them on salad. And dahlias, of course.

Last August, a crew installed solar panels on our roof. They clambered around up there, looking down at the mosaic of our yard and gardens, the corn fields beyond. At the end of the first day, a crew member asked for a favor—could he take some flowers home for his sweetie? I turned him toward the dahlias, and it made me happy to watch him carefully choosing, and then cradling, flowers as he walked to his car. From the touch of hot shingles to the green grasp of dahlia stems at day’s end, it seemed a cheery progression.

The fruits and flowers of our work in the spring soil will eventually end up on the kitchen table, maybe right next to a cooling loaf of bread. All we can touch—the world alive in our hands.

Remind Me Who I Am