93 ~ A few lines composed above the compost bin

“And when he glimpses his compost come to fruition for the first time, he kisses his fingers to his lips. It is like becoming a father to a first-born. He fondly runs his hand through what was once manure and asks, ‘Can this be?’” 

- J.I. Rodale

As you might have discerned, dear readers, gardening bends toward the spiritual for me. The garden is, afterall, a sort of green church, a place where miracles unfold.  In spring I push some impossibly small seeds into the ground, leave them to the care, power and grace of the Sun, and some weeks later, with little further input from me, I can feed multitudes.  

If my garden ‘church’ has the parallel of an altar, it is the compost pile. The compost pile is the garden’s breathing, beating heart, where transpires two of the miracles at the core of this Catholic boy’s catechism: transubstantiation and resurrection. In the compost pile, the dead and discarded are transformed to new life (and it gets so radiantly warm that the compost, too, could probably leave its image on a shroud).

Most of us spend our lives fundamentally concerned with one core question:  What happens after this human “I”, this “me”, physically dies – does some essence of us live on, or does our train simply reach its final station?  

Even if we don’t consciously ponder mortality on a daily basis, it probably lies behind the vague, pervasive background anxiety many of us feel, and our attempts to numb it through opiods, the internet or pick your poison, or to cheat looming annihilation by grasping at fame or never-enough wealth.

Gardeners are fortunate. We see the answer to the Big Question every time we peer into the compost bin, and there witness the transformation of the dead to new life and a foundation for the growth of new beauty. If a lettuce leaf can find renewal after death, perhaps my chances are pretty good, too.

My compost pile is a Good Book, whose pages I finger and read as I crumble the resulting humus in my hands. It is also a chronicle, of nearly all that has transpired in my garden, and in much of my life, as well.  It is a particularly good diary of my relationships with loved ones, whom I define as those I feed, and who feed me. Consider some of the contents of my compost pile: 

·       Plate scrapings from the lunch for the celebration of my daughter Alonda’s graduation from college;

·       Remains from the potluck for my late brother Jim’s memorial gathering, with food made and contributed by those who loved him;

·       Crust crumbs from a quiche Alonda made on her most recent visit, brushed off my plate into the kitchen compost bucket like Communion crumbs into the chalice;

·       The bones and remains of fried wild trout - shimmering constellations I pulled from a stream, then quickly killed with grief and gratitude;   

·       Trimmings from making venison jerky from the flesh of the big, beautiful doe Corina and I shot last fall, the doe that had a trailing fawn that Corina could see, but I did not before I fired;

·       Withered red roses, that when fresh lit up Corina’s face at the airport;

·       The contents of the small ceramic spirit bowl from the dining table, where tokens from meals are gratefully gifted back to and shared with the Holy that provided the food;

·       The goldfinch and the vole left on the doorstep by the cats;

·       Peels and trims from the parsnips, potatoes, carrots, turnips, butternut squash and pumpkin that were transformed into Thanksgiving dinner for many of the people I love most in this world;

·       Old offerings, to be replaced with fresh, from the table at which I feed the spirits of my ancestors and dearly departeds; at times Swiss chocolate, or Alonda’s rhubarb crisp, or one of the sublime orange scones baked by my sister-in-law Kathy, widow of my brother Doug;

·       Grounds from the coffee made by brother Tom, as we sat in the kitchen one morning, reminiscing about our childhood, and our family, those still here and those who have gone on to somewhere we don’t know;

·       Shells from the eggs of my Dominique hens  – those miracle jewels laid by the queens of Quebec;

·       Rinds from the cheddar cheese hand-crafted by my generous friend, Willi;

·       Flies I pinched from the screens, with some reflection, inconclusive, about what makes the life of a housefly less significant than that of a trout or a deer, or indeed a human brother;

·       Sediments from a bottle of 1966 Château Latour and a 1957 Portuguese red, savored with my proudly Portuguese friend, Eric, on his first visit to my home. Whose hands picked those grapes in Portuguese hills in the 1950s, and started their journey to my compost pile? I do not know, but I remember them.
These are some of the lives and the stories that enrich my compost - that great teacher of the way things are.  And come next spring, the sweetness and the grief of these stories will be folded into the earth, to nourish the next stories in this unending, mysterious and beautiful line.

What I’m reading and can recommend:

If you’d like to put your hands deeper into the topic of compost, all the way up to your clavicles and perhaps beyond, check out J.I. Rodale’s charming classic, The Complete Book of Composting (1960). Among my man’s 1,007 pages(!) you’ll find gems like the passage at the top, and this: 

“Our composter is a marveling witness, a privileged observer of something which is on the other side of life. He sees death and birth, destruction and creation, under his own hands.  He witnesses the interplay of powerful, mysterious forces which are part of the cycle of nature’s round. He sees the life when the breath of life goes out, when its sap dries up, and observes it mutate into a soft, new living substance… He has observed the unsavory dunghill transform itself into the means of producing the enchanting rose.”