loam

“You could smell the heavy loam in the deep cool woods—the Yazoo and Big Black rivers were running along,” she tells Lyell after an autumn drive through rural Mississippi in 1935.

At first, settling into the moist loam, the plant is an innocent sproutling, soft and gentle, harmless, edible to browsing Herefords.

Small asides like these root this character-driven mystery in a spiritual loam, a reflection of Inglesby’s narrative contemplation of day-to-day living as an exercise in faith.

Monday morning, workers will begin placing soil — sandy loam mixed with lightweight volcanic aggregate — on the wildlife overpass.

The result, if we want to get really geeky, is a mix of clay, pure sand and sandy loam.