Ever since I can remember, I’ve loved playing in the dirt. That bottle by my side in this picture taken circa 1971 in Chile? It’s a vegetable oil bottle my mom let me have, a perfect receptacle in which to make… chocolate milk, of course.
Dirt and water. I can still feel the soft, silky earth sifting through my fingers. Still smell the damp dirt on my hands. And all of it adds up to a certain kind of delight: the simplest form of joy.
Half a decade later, now on the Northern Hemisphere, playing in the dirt is still my favorite. These days that includes composting. Which I like to call, “making dirt.”
A couple of months ago, it was all I could do not to go into the corner of our back yard to turn the compost. I wanted to spy on worms at work, a sure sign of healthy decomposing in progress. But it was too early. Our nights here in upstate New York—in late January and February—were still below freezing, even if a day here and there teased us into taking off our coats.
If you keep a garden, you probably know that the best soil for growing healthy, happy food is good compost. And really, it’s quite easy to do.
My compost routine
Here’s how we do it:
1) Collect our vegetable waste and scraps in a small bin in our kitchen
2) When it’s full, empty the bin onto the compost heap in a corner of our yard
3) Then, hardest part: Bide. My. Time. (While it breaks down)
4) When the weather is warm enough (and/or my patience exhausted), I spy. This looks like taking a big garden fork and poking it into the heap and stirring things a bit to see if the motion wakes up any worms, and if I see worms…
5) OMG! Jump up and down because, It’s working! I’m making dirt!
(Note: You can make dirt without jumping up and down.)
“I am future compost”
I’m not sure if I first saw these words on a T-shirt somewhere or if they appeared in my head all brand spanking new and shiny: I am future compost. Whichever the case, I chuckled about being “future compost” so often, my husband designed and had a T-shirt made for me.
Because here’s the thing: one day worms will do their work breaking my body back down into dirt, and—cross fingers!—it will be the best possible soil for something new and wonderful to grow in.
Of course, metaphorically this is pretty great, too: the notion that I—whatever I have made of and with my life—will contribute to new, and hopefully, healthy growth. This line of thought is progress for a girl who, when she wasn’t making chocolate milk out of dirt and water, spent an inordinate amount of time biting her nails about a literal, lake-of-fire hell, mulling over her options in the afterlife, and taking measures—again and again, ultimately too many times to count—to not end up in the hot place down below. (My parents were evangelical missionaries. The subject “what happens when you die” came up daily.)
Down gets a bad rap. So does below. Also, dark. Maybe it’s because we can’t see what’s happening. Maybe it’s the addiction we seem to have to all things light and bright.
Because dark is full of uncertainty.
But what, actually, is so bad about not knowing? Unless you add fear to the mix.
Lace anything with fear, and it will change licketty-split-like from playful possibility to foreboding dread.
All this isn’t to say that in another moment you might not find me, still, in Mary Oliver’s words, “sighing and frightened, or full of argument,” at the prospect of dying, saying, no no no not yet at the realization that I can’t really know when that very last exhale will pair up, finally, with the very first inhale I took when I was born.
Even so, EVEN SO, I like remembering that life includes birth and death and everything in between. And that I am part of it all, including dirt. And when fear arrives (because I know it will), I can say: “C’mere, my dear, I saved you a spot right here. Make yourself comfy. Wanna go spy on some worms making dirt?”
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