In the spring, at the end of the day, you should smell like dirt.

Atwood’s line celebrates spring as a season of physical engagement with the living world: planting, digging, tending, and being outdoors until evening. “Smell like dirt” is both literal and emblematic—an endorsement of honest labor and a rebuke to overly sanitized, indoor, or purely aesthetic relationships to nature. The sentence implies a moral or restorative value in contact with soil: to be marked by earth at day’s end is to have participated in renewal, growth, and the cyclical work that spring demands. It also carries a quiet sensuality, suggesting that the scent of soil is a desirable trace of a day well spent.