It was a Sunday afternoon. I went out to look at the compost pile I started six months ago. About three feet high, the pile was covered by a mix of leaves – oak, maple, hackberry, and grass – in various states of decay. Also, littered here and there were: peelings from an avocado; weeds yanked from the yard; the scatterings of coal and hickory ashes from our tenant’s smoker; shuckings from corn we cooked with MGreen’s dad; green beans we bought at a premium organic price from Whole Foods but never cooked; bitter melon our friend Nicole bought us but that we were afraid to eat; curled tulip blossoms; and half an onion, its layers thrown in high relief from having dried out, separated, and pulled back, as if onions are tulips’ dark sisters, blooming as they decay. I wasn’t back there looking at the compost pile for nothing. I had with me half a pot of brown rice and a container full of mashed yams, both too old to eat. Time to turn the pile, long over due actually, and add some new matter. I was excited to unveil the pile, not only for the physical labor my office body badly needs. Perhaps the sloughings and detritus from our lives -- MGreen's, BabyG's, and mine -- would reveal something to me, whatever it is I search for by light of day and never find. Each artifact brought back traces. An avocado sandwich MGreen made me, snatches of conversations from my in-laws’ visit, and an inane argument I tried to make-up for with flowers. Perhaps turning the compost pile would be like peering into the hippocampus and poking at memories unmediated, rummaging through the jumbled scraps of the past before they get reorganized into the Past and my Memory.
With the first scoop of my shovel, I saw a black beetle the size of my thumb tip scramble away. Then innumerable, tiny bugs (are they infants?) moving in every direction, their white bodies set off against the black rot. They disappeared. They seemingly dissolved back into the mound. I dug down deeper and there were dozens of white and tan roly-polies. The sweetness of the rot was in the air. The leaves lost all trace of shape, the rot had a consistency of its own. But even towards the bottom of the pile, I would encounter the occasional intact stump of a cabbage, a whole lime still deep green, or a cross-section of a sweet potato. Deeper down – where the rot was the rich black of mature compost – I came upon something astonishing. I didn’t know what it was. My heart raced. I rushed to the house with a clod of dirt on the shovel blade to show MGreen.
MGreen wasn’t even showing when I started that compost pile. BabyG weighed less than a pound. Composting was just one task in our greater effort to become green parents living responsibly in the urban beast called Houston. However, the compost became something more without my really expecting or understanding it. The expecting parent who does not carry the baby (i.e. the father, the other mother, the non-receptacle person, or what have you) carries the psychic burden of expectation and fear, but has no embodiment of that stress, no physical growth in the womb to focus on. The compost pile became my substitute womb. Baking cookies in the oven, remodeling the bathroom, building a crib – parents do all kinds of things to project their desire to control an uncontrollable process onto something that can be controlled. Compost has the advantage over these other activities of being biological in a way that is both scientifically explainable and yet mysterious, much like pregnancy. Compost incubates. Nine to ten months, in fact, is a typical length of time for maturation.
Parenting guidebooks usually acknowledge the stress that the non-pregnant parent(s) experience, but stop there. Some books and magazine articles tell you that it is your duty to work out your baggage for the sake of the baby. But an expecting parent can’t always be expected to work it all out in forty weeks. What if there is a history of incest, abuse, divorce, death, difficulty conceiving, or multiple miscarriages? What if one or both of the partners is in the middle of a crisis? Will the mother and child have a safe place to stay after the delivery and money during a time when she cannot work? But even when there are urgent matters to focus on, expecting a child has a way of turning the psyche. The mental exhumation is overwhelming. Memories unearthed. The fear of reproducing everything you loathe in relationships. Worst of all, the truths are always scurrying away into the recesses of your mind like tiny albino bugs. Your psyche keeps turning on itself even if you try to will it to stop.
When you turn a compost pile, you don’t figure the compost out. Compost is, after all, a mass of decay, not a time capsule or an analyst’s couch or a laboratory experiment. The unknowability of the compost’s totality does not keep you from turning the compost over. You turn it regularly, once a month if you don’t want the heat at its center to fizzle out. You turn the compost if you want it to become rich fertilizer for a garden. In the process, you might come face to face with the creatures that commonly live in compost piles – beetles, roaches, mice, rats, possum, worms – animals that will not kill you but that you might fear. You get over it. The possum and the rats move away if you keep the compost moist. The worms are good for garden soil. They leave casings. For me, the compost pile became a useful embodiment of what for me could only be an idea. An idea that I was to smile about at all times but that threatened to eviscerate my sense of self. Compost was an alluring metaphor for me precisely because of its productive darkness and mystery.
When I got back to the house with my shovel and clod of dirt, I opened the door and called for MGreen to come quick.
“I found something at the bottom of the compost pile and I don’t know what it is,” I said.
MGreen rushed over and looked down at the shovel blade. We were in the kitchen. In the middle of a black chunk of compost, there was a shining white ball about the size of a marble. It unfurled. The thing looked like an overfed, albino caterpillar as long and thick as my finger. There were many more where I found it. I was delighted that throwing my refuse in a pile could make a habitat for such a fantastic thing, but I felt bad exposing it to light. Could I be killing a future butterfly? Even a moth? MGreen took digital pictures and googled around the net. After some time, she shouted out, “I know what it is – beetle larvae.” The little white bugs were probably mites, which are actually arachnida and often thrive alongside beetles.
Was it disappointment that I felt? Wouldn’t it have been better if the larvae were meant to become beautiful creatures, not the hard-backed survivors of millennial ruin known as beetles. MGreen said she was terrified of beetles. She’s afraid of the compost now. When she said that, it became clearer to me that when I unearthed the shining larvae, I had experienced the sublime. Sublime in the sense that Edmund Burke had meant it -- the astonishing union of terror and beauty, danger and excitement, fear and awe. And what could be better preparation for the (hoped for) resurrection of the self that is called “becoming a parent”?
holiday season. I found a merry holly at a store called Buchanan's (psst...here's a list my friend Julie gave me of 
My mother Helen collects an eccentric and dazzling number of ornaments. She has hundreds that people have given her over the years, and even on an enormous tree, there’s not room for all she has. After spending a day putting on lights and decorating tree we had this lovely, lovely visual spectacle to greet us throughout December and January. The tree was always one of the important personalities of Christmas – its antics mirrored the woozy nog-filled ones that took place during my parents’ numerous holiday celebrations. On the years the tree didn’t tip over because in no way does a real pine tree’s base fit into a commercial tree-holder’s stand, one of the cats would invariably decide to climb it, or somebody would stagger into it. Always one of Helen’s favorite ornaments was broken, which was okay in the end. It was a sort of survival of the fittest sort of tree we hailed. 
Last weekend, anti-war activists in Houston were abuzz with activity. Dick Cheney was to speak at a fundraiser for Tom Delay at a luxury hotel in town on the coming Tuesday. The opportunity to create media coverage of the terrifying mélange of corruption, scandal, lies, and policies of war, economic exploitation, and torture that Cheney and Delay represent was very enticing to the activist community. Local groups that often refuse to work together converged. Moveon.org spurred its Houston area members to action. By most 
Last October, the New York Times published an article called “
Well, to cut this story short, I picked a spot in the corner of the backyard to create the compost. I had to dig up an oleander bush, which MaGreen wanted me to do anyways because it is poisonous and she didn’t want our little girl to chew on the leaves. Then I dug little trenches to put the pallets into so they wouldn’t fall over. I made two four-sided bins with the neighbor’s fence as the backside. The front side swings open. I used an old plastic bag as a sort of hinge. I used the leaves from the dug-up oleander bush to inaugurate the pile.
If you’re anything like me, on a productive Saturday about fifteen years ago you might have gathered up the blue dress you never should have bought because you hated it in the store (but it made you look skinnier), and three or four T-shirts you don’t wear because you don’t wear T-shirts, and two or three of your Aunt Izzy’s old frying pans, and a grey wool rug, and the iron you retired since your husband came with a better one, and finally, some baseball hats your mother gave you so she wouldn’t have the problem that you do, now: your give-away pile has sat in a dank corner for so long that you’re afraid to put your hand into the box holding it. You fear worms might have moved in a few years back and started 
MaGreen and I married last February. One of the gifts was a set of frequent-flyer tickets for our honeymoon, enough to get us out of the country. We booked tickets for Panama because we heard it had rainforests but was not yet overrun with tourists. After spending a day in the city, we took a cab to the bus station and asked for a ticket to a national park in the next province. The conductors talked among themselves and then walked us to the bus. 
In the morning, a son (or son-in-law?) named Santiago took us into the rain forest to give us a guided tour. He carried a machete with him. “What kinds of things do you want to see?” he asked.
Before bedtime, the children put on a little play for us. I picked at their guitar and sang a few songs. MaGreen sat with one of Nuris’s daughters and flipped through our Lonely Planet guidebook with her. The girl was especially drawn to the section on Panama City. She pointed to a picture of some shiny skyscrapers and said, “That’s where my mom works.” MaGreen tore the picture out for her to keep. Nuris was leaving the next morning to go back to the American children she cared for in the city. She had already taken an extra day off and had to return.
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