Beauty in Decay

Photo by John Pfahl, 11/8/94 from The Very Rich Hours of a Compost Pile (brussel sprouts and ginkgo leaves)

"My Compost pile, situated in a hidden corner of the garden, constantly changes with the passing months. The rich efflorescence of rotting vegetable matter creates a daybook of both the memorable and mundane meals that grace my table."
--John Pfahl, American photographer

The great power of blogland, and the reason that I can't quit it, is its capacity to capture the beauty and poetry in the mundane--an instant electronic "daybook," as photographer John Pfahl calls his daily composting. Millions of people all over the world have digital cameras at their disposal, as well as access to the networked pixel-displaying device that we're staring at to share these images.

What emerges is literally a snapshot of fleeting beauty that can be shared almost instantly. The photographs I see on blogs and on Flickr have opened my eyes to the quotidian delights around me--the deepened colors of submerged lake stones, light and shadow on a summer floor, a mound of strawberries in a plastic basket.

What I'm finding beauty in lately is the simple act of composting our kitchen scraps. The first time I noticed the beauty in this ritual was in my son's preschool classroom. I usually hang out a little bit after dropoff to just observe. First thing in the mornings the children sit down at their communal table and cut fresh vegetables for snack. They chat sociably as they chop. All of the scraps that don't go into my son the Human Composter are tossed into a small bowl that is then taken outdoors and dumped in a compost "cage."

The ease of the routine and the beauty of returning nature's bounty to the place it began were great motivators for me. After we got home one day my son helped me set up the covered compost bin we had gotten from our local recycling center. Our under-counter bin in the kitchen works great so far, though we'll see whether the warmer temperatures will create a gooey, smelly mess with a swarm of fruit flies attending it. (I guess I'll learn to find beauty in that as well, but perhaps I'll have to go down to the microscopic level to see it.)

Just as I had gotten over my anxiety about composting, Smoothpebble published "Black Gold," her poetic com-post. Her photos epitomize beauty in the mundane and are reminiscent of Pfahl's "The Very Rich Hours of a Compost Pile" series from the early 1990s. Pfahl's inspiration for the compost series was the 15th-century illuminated Book of Hours, Les Tres Riches Heures du Duc de Berry. Illustrated by a number of artists over a span of decades, the masterpiece illuminates the beauty of daily life across the seasons.

March: Sowing the Field;
from Les Tres Riches Heures du Duc de Berry, Mars;
The Musee Conde, France.

A Foothill Home Companion's Flickr group, Remains of the Day, could be Pfahl's Flickr child. The group brings together daily compost vignettes. Like Pfahl's series, the photos serve as daybooks of how the bloggers care for their families and, in a small way, the planet in a manner that's simple and beautiful.

I have of course been noticing the clever, beautiful ways in which bloggers handle kitchen scraps.

Photo of repurposed vintage cooler by maya*made

There are any number of nice, shiny, new covered kitchen compost containers to buy, but of course it's far more appropriate to use a cleanable bowl or other repurposed bucket you have on hand. My favorite compost solutions for the kitchen are repurposed vintage containers. The coolest has to be this vintage cooler at maya*made's mom's barn. I love how it's being used in the exact opposite way of its original purpose, and yet it's a perfect re-use with its airtight lid and convenient handle. In her urban West Coast abode, Maya's mom uses an old lidded metal pot in her kitchen and a rusty fence (from the estate of an 83-year-old Master Gardener) to enclose her outdoor compost bin. I love how her choices encompass so much history and meaning.

Maya tells me that the outdoor caged compost "bin" (below) in use at the barn is super-easy to make. I hope she'll do a tutorial for all of us soon.

Photo of compost bin, repurposed cooler,
and wheelbarrow by maya*made

My knitting friend (and new blogger; yay!) Laura lives in an old farmhouse, and her kitchen compost pail fits the vintage aesthetic beautifully, though it's not vintage. Her family uses a small covered enameled stock pot from the Martha Stewart line at Kmart. Head on over to Laura's blog to say hello and check out her gardening and upcoming composting images. Of course, you'll also be drawn in by her lovely beaded knitting patterns. (I had a chance to learn some knitting basics from Laura this past Sunday, and she is a true spatial genius!) She'll be offering workshops at Squam later this spring, and if Maya isn't enough of a draw for you, access to Laura's gentle, hands-on knitting help should be.

Photo of thrift-store treasures by Resurrection Fern

Can you spot Resurrection Fern's thrifted kitchen-scrap collector in the photo above? The repurposed rooster cookie canister is one of Margie's many great thrift-store finds; she has an excellent eye for beauty in unexpected places--and an eye for a good deal.

I hope to hear what type of kitchen compost bucket you use and any tips you can provide for a novice composter.

Active Versus Passive Voice

I just drank a whole glass of 100 percent cranberry juice (for medicinal purposes only, I assure you; shudder), while simultaneously uploading pictures from my camera, editing said pictures, writing bad poetry, and waiting for an email response from an author. Boy, can I multitask.

Meanwhile I am thinking how much I need for my Monday mornings to be just like this (especially writing the bad poetry part), so that I can process Everything I Learned Over the Weekend While Hanging Out With My Kids (maybe that should be the title, or at least subtitle, of every one of my Monday posts).

Lesson 1: The Vernal Equinox does not bring immediate spring weather. I took my boys to the lake yesterday, and our toesies were cold! My youngest wondered what the white things were on the lake--whitecaps whipped up by a very brisk wind.

Lesson 2: Cold brings out different reactions in people. All I wanted was to stand on the rocks and feel the wind whipping against my cheeks, no matter how cold I got. My younger son doggedly followed through on his compulsion to gather sticks and stones and throw them in the water, no matter how cold he got. My older son declared that he was freezing to death and decided to retreat to the car. All valid reactions.

Lesson 3: Meeting the needs of three said people with very different reactions to a cold, windy lake involves cajolery and compromise. My younger son threw his rocks and branches into the lake until he declared that his fingers were about to "freeze to death." Meanwhile, my older son climbed on rocks for a little while and then raced to the warm car before his toes fell off from the cold. And I got a few minutes of wind-basking, rock-perusing, and picture-taking in between keeping the kids out of the water.

Lesson 3: I much prefer active voice to passive voice, even (especially?) when describing nature. This lesson actually came to me in the shower as I was thinking about my bad poetry, rather than deriving directly from hanging out with my boys. Of course, "He hit his brother repeatedly with a stick" did come up yesterday, illustrating the power of an active verb. The phrasing sounds more direct and evocative than "He was hit repeatedly with a stick wielded by his brother," I think. The latter sounds almost Dickensian. Not to disparage Dickens--the readers in my family all consider him a quite fine writer--but his writing comes from two centuries ago.

The active voice issue came up for me as I was thinking about the crazy assemblage of driftwood, stones, and detritus that the waves had washed up into the crevices of the big rocks along the jetty. I suppose that it's much easier to say that these sculptures were created by natural forces (passive construction) than try to identify and spin out a tale of all the random causal forces involved: geological forces acting over millenia to create these particular rocks and the particular location itself (a glacial lake over the remains of an ancient sea), acts as random as a boy throwing sticks in a lake, nature returning its treasures to a smoother, more primitive state.

Lotte Reiniger's Fairy Tale Films

Image from British Film Institute

How did I miss the British Film Institute's release of a collection of Lotte Reiniger's fairy tale films on DVD? The two-DVD set was just released late last year, and it's an amazing resource for film historians and fans of Reiniger's animated silhouettes. I first encountered Reiniger's work in a magazine find from a used-book sale, and I'm still amazed at how ahead of her time she was. I think this DVD is certainly worth relaxing our family's no-TV experiment for a special screening. I'll be sure to post a review.

Ice and Sun

March seems to have transformed my blog into The Weather Channel. Every day seems to bring new changes to marvel at. We've had a string of sunny days, with temperatures still hovering near freezing at night.

At the lake this past weekend, we saw the ice transformed into transparent sculptures on the rocks and branches. Sheets of icicles hung from fallen trees and dripped into the lake.

I guess the algae that usually fills the lake dies off during the winter, because the water was very clear near the shore. We sailed bark craft off into the calm lake. One rock passenger earned the nickname "Zen Rock" as he patiently sat in the middle of his boat and bobbed peacefully in place.

March Wildness

The recent rains have swelled the creeks. I love the wild sound of the water rushing to join the lake, so I decided to take my morning walk along a nearby creek.



A little hamlet straddles this creek. Charming houses, with their two-story barns, line the road only a few feet from the passing traffic. Little evidence remains that the hamlet once bustled with industry. In the 19th century the creek powered a variety of mills. Sawmills and a furniture factory transformed the trees of the nearby forests into essential products. Grist mills and woolen mills processed the riches of the area's farms. Heavier industries, such as a foundry and plaster and gunpowder mills, also prospered.



I wonder if the hum of these mills could have been heard over the rushing waters.

Bird Signals

The month of March--which I must qualify with: here in the northeastern part of the northern hemisphere in the confusing days of climate change--is so full of excitement and promise and growth ready to explode. For me, March suits my personality the best. It's moody and unpredictable, a wild promise. The creeks are full and boiling with snowmelt and rainfall. Yesterday I walked along the lakeshore, and the wind whipped up angry waves and blew my cheeks numb. Today, though gray, feels warmer, with the air heavy with an expectant humidity. The morning was raucous with bird cries. Literally hundreds of Canada geese called out "North! North! North!" above me as they arrowed their way home. On my walk, I stopped to listen to the high, excited chirps of about a dozen black-capped chickadees in a tall oak tree. A crow scolded me as she swooped away. I didn't have my camera with me to capture this complicated symphony, but I've included a clip of a clear cardinal call I captured last week (it starts at the 12-second mark).

Foggy Day

Spring is very wet and mucky here, and yesterday was a harbinger of the muddy months to come. It wasn't raining, but a gray mist clung to the hills just above the lake, making for a moody day. Despite the chill, I had to get the boys out to the park. I had reneged on my promise to take them to play on Friday because we didn't get out before the rain started, so I knew we'd be facing a mutiny if I didn't get out of the house yesterday.



Our ritual at the park is to feed the ducks first. At the inlet where we usually feed the ducks, we were surprised to see that the water had receded from the shore by about six feet. I suppose that some of the water is still bound up in ice. We walked along the bank until the inlet narrowed and the water was in easier reach. We had just started tossing stale bread to two ducks when a mob of seagulls descended upon us. The boys were not pleased to feed such grabby, greedy birds, so we walked back to the playground.



And this is where our excursion turned sour. My three-year-old was examining a puddle in the middle of the path, and my older son, who is nine, walked up right behind him and with a deliberate shove, pushed the little one down into the puddle. I was tempted to pack them right up, head home, and lock the older boy in a closet for the next century, but I decided that nothing would be gained by that course of action. I figured that the impulsive, aggressive action meant that the older one especially needed the time to work off his extra energy and work through some of his jealousy through play.



And I'm glad that I decided to stay at the park. I'm constantly amazed at how being able to move about freely outside and engage in imaginative play allows children to work out their issues. The boys ended up playing *together*, pretending that one structure was a yellow submarine and playing Open Sesame on it. My older one was the door keeper, allowing him to be dominant, and the younger one was delighted to say the secret password to gain entry. Another child wanted to join the fun, and my younger one, feeling territorial, started spitting at him. (Such primal reactions from these two!!) After some give-and-take with the other child, and a little intervention from me, the three boys ended up happily playing Cruise Ship on a larger structure.

We concluded our time at the park by exploring the paved trails along the lake. My older one rode his bike, and the younger one scootered along and pretended to be a scooter cop. My older one, who has a hard time verbalizing his feelings and experiences, was relaxed enough to open up to me about something special he had made earlier in the week.

When we packed up to go home, the younger one fell asleep in his car seat instantly. As we headed out of the park, the skies finally opened up and the rain started pouring down. I shared a little smile with my older one, and he said, "Great timing!" And I knew at that moment that it was indeed one of those rare afternoons when everything had in fact come together nicely, allowing the fog to lift and the held-back torrent to be released.

A Mini Spring Break

Late February gave me a bad case of the winter blues, along with the flu and bronchitis, but nature gave me a little bit of a remedy for my ills today. Not much sun, but the weather was warm enough for a walk with my son to find some signs of spring life. And we discovered quite a bit!



The first thing we noticed was that the woodpeckers must have been very busy working on this tree all winter long. It had about eight holes pecked all around it.



Doesn't the tree look like one of the Ents from Lord of the Rings?



Here are the first spring flowers that I've noticed, and we saw several clumps of them in all stages of emerging from the ground.



And our first mushroom sightings of the year--these were growing quite happily on a large tree stump.





We also had a close sighting of five of our neighborhood deer. (You may be able to see that one has been tagged.) Our village has formed a committee to determine how the deer population can be controlled in our largely suburban neighborhood. I kind of like them, but I know that the avid gardeners in our neighborhood think that they are a great nuisance.



I noticed a very elegant tree with almond-shaped buds on the tips of its branches. It will be fun to track its progress on my morning walks as spring progresses.

In Memory of My Grandmother

Points of Light

We don’t remember our births--
That instant in time when
Nothingness blooms into a tentative consciousness
Spreading out into all space in every direction,
No trace of separation from the wisps of scents,
The music of many voices,
Or from such minute particles as the dust motes floating in the air
Backlit by the sun streaming through the windowpane,
Like the universe floating in that shaft of light.
That instantaneous creation of a being (all being?)
Is a tenuous thing, yes.
But quickly accreting particles of
Sight, sound, taste, touch
Soon assemble a solid body.

We don’t remember our births.
Likewise, we won’t remember our deaths,
When those particles of our solid being disaggregate,
escaping and spinning crazily out into the void.

But, ah, the in-between,
When billions of suns blaze across the heavens
And dance in intricate rhythm with each other.
That, we remember.

UPDATE: I just came across a quote from poet/writer/naturalist Diane Ackerman that gets at exactly what I was trying to express here: "It began in mystery, and it will end in mystery, but what a savage and beautiful country lies in between." (!!)