Composting My Memoirs

You know that old saying that goes something like, “I put my arm in my sweater, and my mother’s hand came out?” Yeah, well, it’s happening more and more these days.

I started sounding like my mother when I began insisting that my children write their own handwritten thank-you notes after Christmas and birthdays. They’re not always timely in getting these notes out, but at least their getting them done.

As I’d posted in an earlier blog, I’m encouraging my children to wear their jeans more than once to save on doing laundry. (They’re still having a hard time with the ick factor, so I’ve been secretly folding their in-the-laundry jeans and putting them back in their drawers, as if they’d been washed. Shh!) This was something my mother encouraged me to do as a kid, despite my protests about the ick factor, too. As a grown-up I’ve grown used to wearing jeans enough days in the row that my husband and I joke that by the time I’m ready to wash them, they could stand up on their own. But, hey, if they’re not noticeably dirty, why waste the washing machine water?

And I’ve really come full circle now that we’re going to start composting, something my mother has done since I was a child and still does to this day.

We quasi-composted in our old house, in that we used our lawn clippings to “feed” the flower beds and vegetable gardens. Nothing like rotting grass to create rich soil. But our neighborhood association didn’t allow full-blown composting. (They also didn’t allow laundry lines, chain link fences, and metal playsets.) Tomorrow I’m going to pick up a composting bin, thanks to a post asking for one on my local Freecycle listserve.

Yeah, I used to own a composting bin, as I’d written about here, but I foolishly threw it out with the trash. (How contradictory is that–something made for recycling ended up in a landfill. Oh, the irony, the horror!)

We’ve already begun preparing for our new composting plan by tossing food scraps (no meat or dairy, mind you) into an oversized ice cream bucket that we saved from a recent birthday party we’d hosted. We’ve almost filled the two-gallon bucket to the brim with banana peels, egg shells, cucumber skins, and apple cores so that bin couldn’t get here soon enough. And soon enough, I hope, we will be creating fertile soil for our gardens and significantly reducing the amount of trash we create in a week.