It is time to turn the compost.
Underneath the rotting vegetables, coffee
grounds and grass clippings, rich soil has been forming for years.
I untwist the ends of the hardware cloth to reshape
the cylinder anew next to where it used to stand. Once I have created a new
cylinder, I will transfer the contents from the old compost pile into it.
Decomposing organic matter
is the aromatic harbinger of the growing season. This year, my task corresponds
with the backyard neighbor’s blooming Nanking cherry, infusing the compost
stink with sweetness. Spring 2020, however, Covid-19 weighs heaviest in the
air.
Tears well as I work,
listening to the news: those incarcerated, detained, caged have no
chance of avoiding infection in crowded, unsanitary quarters; the
disproportionate death toll on African Americans; the rise in domestic
violence; the rise in livestreaming child sexual abuse; medical personnel in
trash bags like lambs to slaughter. One person every 47 seconds dies of
Covid-19…
Gardening anchors me,
provides a physical outlet for my grief.
I scoop broken eggshells,
slimy cucumbers, black banana peels with my pitchfork into what will be the
bottom of the new compost pile. I transfer sheaves of paperboard and brown
leaves, the wilted loops of squash and sweet potato vines, the plant carcasses
from a black thumb neighbor, still in the shape of pots. The compost bin holds
what we no longer need or want, what we’ve neglected, allowed to spoil.
It is full of our refuse.
Waist high, my bin is also
full of insects, worms and sometimes mice. By the scatter around the bin, I
suspect other critters visit the Compost Buffet. Round the clock and round the
calendar, various beings thrive on what we consider waste. I convey them to
their new home on my pitchfork as they wriggle and writhe, their discreet
hidden lives suddenly exposed. In this way compost provides community—a
mutualistic ecosystem where everyone needs are met.
Soon my backyard neighbors
come outside to do their own work along a fence line we share. The next door
neighbor steps out onto her back porch to say hello. A dear friend wrangles a
large, persnickety stump out from where I want to add another vegetable bed.
Mindful of keeping each other safe, we maintain distance. I am grateful to see them; in this singular moment, we are
each well. Compost is community for me too since I share my bin with
neighbors. Their scraps and trimmings participate in becoming.
That’s what a compost bin
is mainly full of: becoming.
I scoop Dan’s adventure in
vegan flan and remnants of Pat’s haircut into the new pile. Thousands of decomposers shelter and
feed here while the alchemy of time, weather and their refuse transform into
soil.
Soil nurses the various
seeds I gleefully buy when trees are still bare, nourishes the transplants I am
determined to find room for like unexpected guests to the dinner table. Last
year’s decomposing tomatoes become a crucible for this summer’s tomatoes. Soil
is the soul of becoming.
Soil arises from the carcasses of what
was, allowing what is to become what will be. I continue my work, inhaling
the mixture of rot, Nanking Cherry and the specter of pandemic.
As the pandemic spreads,
inequitable, long crumbling institutions acutely reveal the devastating gaps in
social safety nets through which people plummet, suffer and die. To sustain capitalistic
avarice and the systems that prop it up, would be like expecting black peels to
provide bananas, wilted vines to produce fruit. They simply do not hold what we
need. What was, must be discarded for the rot it is.
I think of Arundhati Roy’s words:
The pandemic is a portal between one world and the next. We can
choose to walk through it dragging the carcasses of our prejudice and hatred, our
dead ideas and our dead rivers. Or we can walk through lightly ready to imagine
another world. And ready to fight for it.
"We" is a
critical component of how we imagine another world. This liminal time confirms,
once again, thriving or surviving don't happen through
solitary effort. Similarly, I do not produce veggies on my own: my
neighbors' refuse, decomposers, my friend's muscle, the gift of time, seasons,
sunshine, rain, mulch from Missouri Organic, seeds, transplants and chicken manure from Kansas
City Community Garden Center,
gardening lessons from friends and neighbors all go into my garden beds to
provide squash, garlic, potatoes, arugula, carrots and so on. We walk
through this portal together or not at all.
For a gardener, dead things
have value. Through purposeful release in an intentional container, through
microscopic parsing, through the alchemy of time and community, rotten things
transmogrify. During this season of distancing and few distractions, may the
thousands of us who have the privilege of time, income and true shelter, become
decomposers. Let us shred the carcasses of hate, dead ideas, moldy
institutions. Let us make rich soil from what was. Amidst the stink of rot
and death, what sweet hope wants to bloom like my neighbor's Nanking
cherry? We carry the seeds of what the world can be: a mutualistic ecosystem
in which the needs of all beings are met.
