 
“Everything your father and I worked so hard to preserve you from,” she said, “you like.” What can I say? When I was a child, I loved to play in dirt. Little did I dream that someday I would be able to create dirt. I will never get good and wealthy myself, but I have made my share of rich soil. My father told me that his grandfather, in cracker Florida, was “poor as owl dung.” If you’ve ever seen owl droppings, hard little pellets of mouse hair and bones, you know they’re not going to contribute much to your prospects for waxing fruitful, but I have added some of them to my compost, in acknowledgment of my roots. They have mingled with collapsed jack-o’-lanterns, buggy cornmeal, maple leaves, and lobster shells to create loam. Even some of my current neighbors, who tend to be, if anything, whole-earthier-than-thou, have accused me of caring more about compost than about the eventual phlox and tomatoes. That is true only in the sense that I may devote more time to fussing with the compost than to fussing with the phlox and tomatoes. I offered my wife a similar explanation recently when she asked whether I cared more about my sinuses than about her. That was insensitive of me, I realize now. I should not have drawn an analogy between my sinuses and my compost, because I love my compost. My sinuses follow me around, nagging. My compost stays out in the yard and works. My cereal dregs and dead daffodils decompose together so that my phlox and tomatoes might thrive. And I do appreciate those tomatoes. They are red and robust and they do not taste like supermarket tomatoes, which are made of vinyl. But I admit, compost appeals to me in and of itself. I have always been tickled by e pluribus unum. Spaghetti sauce or soup can incorporate considerable diversity, but there are limits. Compost is almost a wide-open town. Broccoli stalks lie down with shreds of the New York Times, stale Ritz crackers with herbal tea bags, gone-musky garlic cloves with blown rhododendrons. Give me your tired, your poor, your stringy, and your mildewed — the wretched refuse of your teeming fridge. And of course I keep an eye out for dung that isn’t owls’. Years ago I had an old horse, and more manure than, honestly, I needed. Now I have to make do with road apples of opportunity. Do you know how Aunt Betsey Trotwood, in David Copperfield, runs out and waves a broom to chase off donkeys whenever they pass her house? When people ride horses past mine, I am glad. If I thought I could run out and startle them, the horses, into making a deposit as they go by, I would. That stuff makes your compost strong. I fuss with my heap, yes, but I have a gimme cap that says “Compost Happens,” and this I believe. Someone sent me a video put out by Alameda County, California, entitled Do the Rot Thing. Exemplary Alamedans are shown systematically turning out compost that, by the looks of it, might be packaged as a breakfast cereal or knitted into a nice nubbly sports jacket. My compost is stranger than that. More Southern. Speaking of which, I used to add a lot of Red Man tobacco leavings to my compost. Oddly enough, I don’t think of composting as a Southern thing. However progressive the many Southerners of my acquaintance are in other respects, and however down to earth, most of them treat salade fatiguée and moldy oranges like trash. I have seen dear friends toss precious organic materials right in with popped bubble wrap and outworn socks. They would just as soon throw away eggshells, banana peels — or even coffee grounds — as spit. Over the years I have buried three snakes and untold fingernail clippings in my compost heap. I used to add a lot of cigar butts as well as Red Man leavings. My system won’t tolerate tobacco anymore, which is just as well, but no quid ever fazed my compost. My compost is gradually eating a pine log eight inches thick that I put in there as a friendly challenge. Maybe I could have consoled my mother if I had expressed my feeling for compost in hymnal terms: What once was waste now is ground. |
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