Uphill Both Ways is a fragment by Jack Rusher, published here Saturday, January 03, 2004. It is part of Stories.
A brief dialogue on adversity.
Isaac leaned back in his chair, took a drag from his cigarette and said, “We’re the suffering people of the world; always on the run, never with a home — none have suffered as we have.”
“Och, you’ve my pity, truly you do.” Seamus took a sip from his pint, his face reshaped by a toothy grin that wrinkled the corners of his eyes as if he were squinting at the sun.
“I mean, you’ve had your troubles — I’ll give you that — but you’ve always had your lovely green island.”
“Aye, things have been rosy aside from the cold, the famine, the poverty and seven hundred years of colonization by our neighbors, not to mention the on-going war of liberation conducted in agonizing slow motion.”
“Still, it isn’t like you were wandering in the desert...”
“No, nothing like that, though we did need to make our own soil.”
“Made your own... how?”
“Seaweed.”
“Seaweed?”
“And rocks. We hauled seaweed and rocks up from the sea, pounded the rocks to dust and mixed in the seaweed to make compost. It took us near to four hundred years to make soil fit for growing food. Can you imagine it? A nation of poets pounding rocks into sand for four hundred years just to plant potatoes.”