Composting

I got to get a trash man. Not for me, of course, but for my garbage. Up until I moved to my new place, I had garbage service. But I haven’t hired a new one for over here. I hadn’t really needed to. At my last job, I would just take my garbage there and put it into the giant dumpster just like most of the other employees would. I would do it and not feel bad about it either. But I haven’t been at that job for nearly two months now and my garbage cans are full. It isn’t a nasty situation…I try to keep food out of the garbage and there shouldn’t be anything in there that is recyclable, but after two months of not taking the bags away, there just isn’t much more room for more. I guess I could load it up and take it to the dump myself, but, nah. Let me help the local economy by hiring someone to do it for me.

I remember living in a trailer (oh, so much worse than this one…this one is great!) when I was in college. I lived with my future brother-in-law, my sister, and another friend. The closet in my room had a hole in the floor where my cats would enter and exit the building at their own leisure. The electrical panel would sometimes make a crackling noise and emit a sulfur-like smell complete with smoke. How the trailer never burnt down is a wonder to me. Needless to say, overall cleanliness was not top of our list. We didn’t have a garbage man there either. I think we were just too cheap to pay for it. Once a month, someone would load it up and take it to the dump. In the meantime, we would place the full bags on the back porch. Now the porch had a door, but there were some holes in the floor back there too. Every now and then, wild woodland critters would come in to make themselves at home to the leftovers slowly rotting in easy-to-claw-open bags. My daughter thinks possums are cute. I suppose they can be. I tend to think that they are just R.O.U.S.’s (Rodents of Unusual Size). They aren’t so cute when you step out on the back porch in the middle of a dark night to one virtually in your face, on top of a bag of garbage and hissing at you like a pissed-off cobra. You ever hear one hiss? I just about jumped into the next life hearing that noise after shutting the back door behind me in the darkness of that porch…

Those creatures were after the food we had left in the bags; food that had started to rot and smell rather tasty to some furry critter. I have started doing something lately in preparation for spring. I want a garden. I have plenty of land to make one on (just figuring out where to put it is the problem) and with the success of gardens in the past, I want to do it again. I love fresh veggies, and to know that I grew those veggies makes them taste even better. So, I have started a compost bin. Well, not a bin just yet, but a large can with a lid for the time being. I just scrape leftover foods (not meats…those go to the cat or dog) into this can so it can rot. Banana peels, plate scrapings, used coffee grounds; old leftovers stinking up the fridge…all go into the can. When I get the bin ready, I will add the food to the rotting leaves, mulch, and grass. I realize that I should have started in the fall of last year, so this stuff may not be ready for when I need it, but what I hope to achieve is to make some rich, loamy soil to mix into the soil from the tilled area for the garden. It is supposed to rich in nutrients that the plants need to thrive. It is just nature’s way. Rot leads to richness. Sickness leads to health. Death leads to life.

I heard something about composting tonight that was the catalyst to the brainstorming that led to this writing. I was watching something on PBS on family crafting. At the end of the show, the host showed us a large can (hey, like mine!) where she was adding food to let it rot to add to her compost bin. She made a face when she opened the lid and said that it stank. She then said that composting could be compared to life. Sometimes, life stinks. When it does, it is full of bad times that rot your outlook on life, make you wonder why things are the way they are, and make it impossible to see what is ahead. But if you take all the bad, rotten times and add them to the whole scheme of life, i.e. the compost bin, eventually the result is a life full of richness that smells of the good life and full of potential. The end result is a mixture that provides nutrients that make the seeds that you plant grow bigger and healthier (new life), is the perfect base for them to take root (mental and physical strength), and fights of disease better than any chemical you can buy (the ability to face the bad times when they come).

I couldn’t have said it better. When the show was over, it was all I could think about. I thought it was a coincidence that I had started one and was thinking along the same lines when I did…and then I see this. Strange. And then I had to ruin the happy feeling by switching the channel to one that was showing The Sixth Sense. And of course it was just about to the end where Bruce Willis’ character discovers that he is a ghost, talks to his wife in her sleep, and is finally able to go to his “better place”. I guess I am just a sappy sad sack, but when his wife asked him in her sleep why he had left her all alone, I felt my eyes tightening and getting wet. I couldn’t help it. What I saw was a love that would last forever, even when one person was gone…the love would always be there but they would not be able to touch skin or hear words or have one more taste. What a waste.

What a pile of compost…