There are many kinds of dirt, some dirtier than others, and the plate had held not just dirt, but enriched organic matter. It had been carefully cultivated, fed, watered, and turned over the better part of a year, in a spot selected for high sunshine content and the appropriate amount of aeration.
About 15 years ago, or perhaps even 20, my father brought home a large carton containing chunks of heavy-duty black plastic. I don’t think anybody thought much of it, nor did anyone question it when he began assembling said chunks of black plastic into a larger object in the backyard. After all, this was Dad, famous for bringing home large and impractical (okay, sometimes practical) objects to be deposited in the yard for indefinite periods of time. Occasionally these items would be tinkered with, assembled, disassembled, or moved, but more often they would just be mown around and/or filled with other objects of similarly indiscernible value and/or purpose. As it turns out, this particular instance was a bit different, particularly in the sense that Mom approved… and so did I. Michael, I believe, was indifferent. The large black plastic object was assembled into a composter and strategically placed at the end of the dog kennel. Outside of the dog kennel, that is. It received a lot of southern exposure and a fair bit of west-slanting sunlight as well, back in the days before our oak trees were massive shading behemoths. This composter was, and remains, a magical box of mystery.
Anything we put in it just…. disappeared. Into thin air. “Aren’t composters supposed to create something?”, I wondered every so often as I opened it up, batted away the hordes of small six-legged flying things emerging from it, and threw in kitchen scraps. Other people in the know, cool folks into the environmental scene spoke of the great fertilizers they emptied from their composters on a regular basis, enhancing their gardens and tomato plants. But not ours. Ours was perhaps the most efficient composter in the northern hemisphere, gulping up loads of scraps, leaves, and unreasonable amounts of grass clippings the summer I got carried away with raking. * Despite unbalanced amounts of green and brown layers and owners who disdained to turn or stir the compost most of the time, that black box was unstoppable. Not to mention the fact that it was bottomless. No, really. I imagined for a while that perhaps Dad had dug a large hole under it before installing the composter, sort of like an outhouse for vegetable matter, but this was not the case.
* actually, there were several of these years. I have a bit of OCD and occasionally would become obsessed with raking all of the lawn after it was mown. Ours is not a small lawn, and blisters ensued. This would happen not just at our place, but anywhere I saw a rake and piles of grass to be gathered. Finally one year my parents convinced me that it was good for the lawn to have the grass clippings left on it. But every year when my neighbour’s tree drops crabapples on the postage stamp yard of our rented apartment, I pick up a rake and go to town. Blisters ensue.
