The soil around our house is damp and muddy down to two feet right now and the bottomland between the house and the river just finally surface-dried a few weeks ago. For the first time in twenty years, we owned a creek down there for a year. I always wanted to own a creek. The river is still very high, above all the rocks and ledges. What's left of our riverbank after September's river rampage is God-sized scoops of sand, celestial spoonfuls of barren dirt. With every flood, the river trowels out long ditches as wide as twenty feet, up to ten feet deep, trying to make an island where our riverside garden once flourished. My spouse, at odds with the forces of nature in this instance, hauls in and fortifies the old bank annually with truckloads of large stones. Despite my logical appeals that this laborious effort is useless, doomed to failure against the inevitable dynamics of geology, the river has been diverted, covering the rock fortifications with sand and soil where grass and weeds have taken root. We will not own an island in my lifetime. I wanted to own an island.

Mountain land is acidic and the top soil is very thin. Dig down an inch or two and you're at "hardpan," very tough stuff, sort of like black concrete. Rainfall hitting the mountains has little to sink into and ends up ... in our creek. Riverfront soil, on the other hand, is absorbent, alkaline and the top soil may be as deep as two feet. I discovered all this years ago by lovingly, carefully digging up mountain laurel and various high-altitude wildflowers, transplanting them around the house, and watching them wither and fade. "What's wrong here?" I asked plaintively. "Aaaaaaaaak," they replied. "Limestone! Yich!" Acid fertilizer didn't help much, probably because its regular application requires more gardening organization than I'm capable of mustering. "Don't worry, honey. I just put that stuff on the rhododendron." "That was FIVE WEEKS AGO! They're practically dead." Whoops. "I'd better water the peas. It hasn't rained for nearly a week." "You've said that nearly every day. They all have root rot." Oh.

Sliding on ever-wet grass and ground toward a likely spot, you never know exactly what you'll run into when you dig down, say, to plant a bush around here. It may be a plan-altering limestone boulder that stretches, it turns out, ten feet in each direction. Maybe red clay, clumped and plant-intolerant (except for sweet potatoes). With a little luck, though, it will be nearly black, soft and sifted, seemingly bottomless topsoil. Whatever it is, right now you can pretty much count on it being ... wet.