I’m finally writing about compost, but don’t leave me on that account. I think about this subject fairly obsessively, and while it’s become a suburban constant in Canadian cities — trucks for curbside pickup, pretty green bins on wheels — it’s not even on the radar in China. So let’s talk about compost. Don’t you love dialogue about rotting fruit and decaying leaves? I do.
It’s one of my oldest and clearest links, I realized recently, with a long-departed father who was always present while I grew up, but in a fairly vague and fogbound way. For some reason, maybe just because we weren’t that far removed from farmers in our rural community, we had a compost heap in the backyard 50 years before most people did.