An Introduction to Composting

I don’t come from a composting family. We had a massive hump of yard litter in the woods behind our house, but we never put anything there from the kitchen, and we never re-used the compost for anything else. The pile just sat out there in shade behind a line of pines and poplars, built up with raked leaves in the fall and cut grass in the summer, gradually flattening and compacting into itself, resting quiet and unmolested.

I started kitchen composting in March of 2023. I scraped and leveled a square of bare gray dirt in a corner of the back yard and bought a plastic vented compost box from Home Depot. After putting down a layer of twigs to help the compost aerate, I started dumping in scrap uncooked fruit and vegetables, rinsed eggshells, and coffee grounds. Nothing cooked, and no meat at all. No paper.

But why am I composting? This past spring I started a small vegetable garden so I’d have someplace to put the compost, which is sort of backwards. It’s a relatively small amount of waste getting recycled into soil. I do like the feeling of not wasting even that much unused or spoiled produce, or at least wasting it differently. But I also like decay. I find it comforting, the very gradual change of state, the reduction of complexity into simplicity.

No yard waste goes in this compost. Sometimes I’ll toss in a handful of cut flowers that died in a vase, gifted to us commemorating a birthday or anniversary. The most recent flowers in the compost were sent as condolences for my father’s passing, and they’re taking a long time to decompose. The withered blooms keep resolute in their corner of the bin as other plant matter settles down around them. Not unlike the little pile of my parents’ ashes tucked into the roots of the beech tree elsewhere in the yard, stubbornly present for months and yet composting in their own way.

My first published freelance writing predates the digital era by a few years. I’d had a handful of disposable poems and short stories published here and there, and a couple articles printed at other places where I interned. But it was in 1996 that I first got paid for writing a freelance article. This was a story about my experience as an extra for the Pierce Brosnan volcano movie Dante’s Peak, published in the Pacific Northwest Inlander in Spokane, Washington, where I was going to grad school. I think I got paid fifty bucks, or maybe even a hundred. But at least fifty.

The Inlander was part of the reliable system of alt-weekly papers you could find in almost any town of any size nationwide, either local and independent or part of a regional syndicate. They published endless weird little ads for local concerns like the pickup football tournament and pager store seen above—catering to those who had a little money to advertise but couldn’t afford the town’s daily newspaper. And so the alt-weeklies also had scraps of cash to pay for words to fill all the pages around those ads. The money wasn’t great, so neither were the words, but it was something.

I wrote a few other stories for the Inlander on whatever topic they’d take. The same continued when I moved back to the South, writing for alt-weeklies like Creative Loafing in Atlanta, which was probably the closest thing east of the Mississippi and south of New York to a massive Village Voice-style hipster culture readout. I wrote about books, movies, travel, history. I wrote what I imagined were arch-but-cerebral cultural correspondent stories about the worst topless show in Vegas, the best machine-gun festival in Kentucky, and the hidden canyon in Alabama populated by glowing worms.

The vast majority of those weeklies are long gone along with their freelance budgets, though the Inlander is still making it work as a physical paper and website, bless their heart. Sadly, my volcano movie story didn’t make it into their online archives, far as I can tell. Creative Loafing doesn’t publish a paper anymore, but they still run online and they actually have several of my stories posted from twenty years ago. Bless their heart as well.

I still have a physical copy of that issue of the Inlander in a plastic bin in my basement, along with copies of all those clips from Creative Loafing issues and other papers and magazines that no longer exist in any form, online or otherwise. The clips are getting a little yellowed in their airless box, a little brittle, and they look exactly like the kind of charmingly nostalgic but ultimately discardable personal mementoes we threw out by the boxload when sorting my parents’ possessions, post mortem. That’s okay though, it’s natural. The thought of my own kids one day sifting though those clips, dwelling wistfully for a moment on their poignant anachronism before tossing them out, or even trashing them unregarded, is a comfort and connection in its own way too.