The Time I Ate Dirt

By: Maddy Meyer

Six feet is a lot more than you think. Many people realized this during Covid, when we all had to stay six feet away. I learned this in a much different way.

The park was beautiful that morning. The water glittered underneath the heavy sun, white dots danced across the surface. I could see a duck here and there, staying far away from the busy hustle of the park and the people there. The trees seemed to reach towards me, their branches hung down low and the leaves were sprinkled with spots of yellow and orange. The air smelled like pine and cinnamon and the chocolate chip cookies my mom had made earlier that morning. 

It was just my dad, my little brother, and I. We had gone out early to the park, hoping that it could be our own quiet oasis. Our hopes were unfounded. The park was already busy and bustling with people and activities. There were runners, dressed in short-shorts and neon Nike shirts. There were tired parents, their kids dangling from their legs. There was a family having a picnic, the blanket a luscious red and piles of fruit and plates piled on it. 

My brother and I had eyes on one thing. The swing set. There were two seats open next to each other. We ran for them, leaving my dad in the dusk. Not that he minded, he probably wanted time to read all by himself and watch the ducks. 

I could hear them quacking from my sizable distance from the lake. They were noisy this morning; they had something to say. My brother and I started swinging. We always had a competition on who could swing higher. There was never really a winner, we only did it until one of us got bored or we started playing something else. Some days it was Aliens, other days it was Time Travel. 

We got to swinging. Soon we were flying high. It was a beautiful view; you could see the slope of the hill, and the road and houses that sat beyond the park. I wanted to stay up there all day. I had once read in a book that you could never have too much sky, and I thought that the author was right. On a day like today, you really couldn’t get enough.

“I dare you to jump off from there,” my brother poked at me. “What? No way!” I responded. Jumping off the swing, mid flight? Something like that was dangerous, especially since I hadn’t done it a lot before. I could definitely imagine myself breaking an arm, a tooth, or my whole face. 

“Come on! I Triple Dog Dare you!” He egged me on. Really, in the grand scheme of things, who was I to say no to a Triple Dog Dare? I started gaining a little confidence. With the wind running through my hair and the soft scent of pine needles wafting towards us, it felt like I could do anything. I prepared myself. The doubt quickly fell away, giving into arrogance. 

I had visions of myself flipping off the swing and perfectly landing on the dirt. I would get a roaring applause, everyone would gasp in amazement and awe.

I got my dad to come over and take a video of it. I was so confident. Nothing in the entire world could go wrong. 

The swing started going up again. I could see the blue of the sky, the cumulus clouds hanging in the air. Before losing my nerve, I jumped. 

The next thing I felt was the dirt in my mouth. 

Here’s the thing: dirt doesn’t really taste bad, it just doesn’t taste good. It tastes like nothing. It was like if I put coffee in a pot and brewed it, then gathered the air all around the coffee pot in a bag and mixed it with cardboard. That’s what the dirt tasted like. Then the pain came. 

All in all, after the blood had been cleaned away and the medicine had been taken, it was actually pretty funny. My dad didn’t think so afterwards. The kid at the park that saw my face and started crying probably didn’t think so either. But it was a cool story. Everyone suddenly wanted to see my face, with its split lip, black eye, and jagged scar on one cheek. I did feel a little like a celebrity, especially when my grandpa laughed so hard he fell out of his chair when he saw the video my dad had taken of me jumping off the swing and face planting. 

The scars faded. The video stayed. My brother asked me what it felt like when I landed on the dirt. I told him that the rumors that dirt tasted like cardboard were pretty true.