The Compost Heap

My mother liked to grow things, and she was good at it. From tea roses to vegetables, she could take a slip of anything and make it flourish. She especially liked to go beyond the basics and find things that were unusual and not often seen in our area of the midwest: bleeding hearts, something called a balloon plant that she threatened me with my life not to go near, and bearded iris in strange shades.

This meant that catalogs often came to our mailbox full of detailed images of flowers, along with glossy magazines detailing other gardeners’ efforts. When my mother was done with them, these became mine, and I snipped and glued and taped them onto my own treasured items: my notebooks.

Over the course of my childhood, I probably had shelves of these notebooks, whether they were spiral-bound, composition-style, or even steno books. They were full of drawings, ideas, stories, and, as I got older, quotes and passages from other books. Covered in the flowers from my mom’s catalogs and magazines, they were uniquely mine.

Eventually, these notebooks morphed into large daytimers that I took with me to undergraduate school. I taped xeroxed poems from my anthologies between the pages, drew in the margins, and copied quotes from favorite authors and sometimes my professors.

After graduate school, saddled with an office job and finding no time to think much less write, my notebooks turned inside out— I used my cubicle walls instead of pages to collect lovely images, snippets of prose, and of course quotations. I was aided and abetted by the availability of a color printer nearby.

When I began writing for a living, I stopped collecting pretty words in a nest of pretty pictures. I had deadlines, word counts, and more practical concerns. I don’t think it’s surprising that during that time, it got harder and harder to feel inspired.

Author Neil Gaiman refers to the collecting habit I’ve described above as composting, and when I heard him describe it thus, I was stopped in my tracks (stopped in folding laundry, actually — I was listening to a MasterClass of his while in the basement laundry room). That’s exactly it, I thought.

Those notebooks of mine were lovely to me, and treasured: they were soothing to my brain, a reflection of my thoughts, a reminder of what I loved. But more than that, they were a source of inspiration. They were catalogs themselves — collections of all the little oddities and interesting thoughts that arrested me and made me wonder. The act of collecting them brought me pleasure, as did the art of arranging them, the time I spent reviewing them.

It has taken the pandemic to get me started composting again. There’s nothing like a global reset to inspire change. A longtime user of Trello for everything from Christmas lists to the news cycle at work, I started a board called “Snippets." On it, I collect bits of dialogue, concepts, little thoughts of my own, ideas I encounter that I want to explore further, funny turns of phrase, and even the quirks of people I encounter. It’s been immensely satisfactory, and helpful for my brain when I’m stuck, either with personal efforts or work writing.

When I paged through my notebooks or now when I scroll through “Snippets,” I’m refreshed by the tiny bits of magic, little spots of beauty, and a host of other fragments of meaning. As Gaiman’s metaphor indicates, they’re rich ground from which ideas can grow. It could be that one of the entries on one of the cards in my Trello board become a story all their own, but even if they don’t, the entire practice means I have a reliable resource of fodder when my brain is dry and tired.

Real-live composting is a wonderful thing to do. My husband is devoted to his compost heap (we call her Margery) and it’s incredible to see and smell the process of the grass clippings, egg shells, and all the produce I routinely waste making something new and regenerative. My mother would’ve loved to have had the dark soil Margery produces for her Peace roses and yellow hyacinth.

Here online, I’ll keep feeding my own version of Margery. You know what? I need to start a Trello board for this blog.