Compost.

It’s mid-afternoon, and everything is broken. Beneath the sink, the maintenance guy grunts. Then the sound of water. “Oh shit,” he says, “do you have another bucket?”  I grab the trash can, jimmy it under the counter. He lets out a long breath.

For months the drain has barely been working, and this time even Drano didn’t help.  I’ve had stacks of dishes and a sink full of smelly, stagnant water for a good week. It makes it hard to live well, in my opinion. Rot is conducive only to rot.

The maintenance guy gets up, takes the can of water to my bathroom sink. He dumps it. “Your sink in here is slow too, you know that?” he says.

“No.”

“Well, you’re not usually pouring giant buckets of water in it, I imagine.” He tips the rest into the toilet. Flushes.

When he heads out, I am relieved. It's a start. The dishes are not washed yet but they will be. The trash is sitting in a tiny bag in the middle of the floor but I will take it out.  I’ll beat you yet, rot, I think.

In the spirit, I grab the compost and swing out of the house. The composter is in back, a a simple black plastic bin against the fence, far enough from the patio that no one will have to smell it.  It’s something I bought myself last winter. I was lonely for the soil.  I didn’t like to think of my scraps being hauled away to some city warehouse, where I’d lose track of how they were doing. Still, too often I stall in bringing them down.

It’s grey out, with the threat of rain.  I pull the lid off, then smile. Green shoots peek out of the slag. When I prod them with my rake, I can tell: half an onion, sprouting.  A couple of rotting potatoes, new arms thick and purple, sending leaves into the air.  I thank them. They are small miracles.

Then I dig the rake into the compost, begin to turn. In places it’s black, close to soil. In places it’s slime and leaves.  I start at the edges and work my way into the packed middle. I comb up a corncob. Spill over, finally, the bag of barley from Erik’s first homebrew. Something in me shifts. I stop. I know what I am touching.

In this bin, the weight of a year. What is thick, heavy, wet. Bitter fighting. A salad half-eaten, the day my blood poisoned. What went to mold while I slumped in a hospital bed. The meal on the table the night he said No, I’m not attracted to you anymore. Tomatoes gone bad as we avoided the house. And cabbages let rot while I sat outside in late summer, cupping white wine, mourning him.

A tentative wind kicks up. I dig in again.

Become something, I ask the compost quietly. Please become something.

Upstairs, rot is conducive to rot. I push the sour edges of my life into a jar and sweep them out. But down here, the hurts sit, given their time.  For a long while they look only like what they are.  Then slowly, the smell fades. They break themselves over into something else.

I am getting close. I can taste the soil without touching it.  This will, again, become life. After the rotting is complete. After the mold takes over.  What breaks us is our beginning. I have to believe that.