The Consumption of Compost

 
The Consumption of Compost
Jesse Curan

See the brown UPS, the white FedEx. See Amanda, our postal worker, in her white truck with red and blue stripes, delivering packages early in the morning and then coming back around lunchtime with envelopes and catalogs. See the Amazon drivers in every variety of marked and unmarked vehicle. See dudes of all ethnicities in reflective vests with music blaring, driving and stopping the vans, all hours of day and night, dropping off packages and taking pictures of them to prove they were dropped.

 

See boxes, see foxes. See consumer ghost, see compost.

 

A recipe for compost: thirty-three percent nitrogen (green stuff; think potato peels, egg shells, coffee grinds) plus sixty-six percent carbon (brown stuff; think leaves, straw, cardboard). Let it all interact with earth. Let the worms and microorganisms do the rest.

 

My family runs a small business that “plans, plants, and maintains” organic vegetable gardens. A business built on growing vegetables often needs other stuff. Enter the delivery truck, bringing all manner of wiring for trellises, of fencing for critters, of seeds from Vermont, of garlic and onion starts from Maine, of berries saplings from Missouri. Most of these things come in a cardboard box. All boxes go into the compost. We plant vegetables and process cardboard. When we’re lucky, things come in a box instead of a plastic bag; every box goes to the compost. We harvest vegetables; we bury boxes.

 

Box, from the late Latin buxi, from Greek pyxis, “boxwood” or pyxion, “writing table, box,” made of boxwood. Otherwise, uncertain origin.

 

How to make compost? Put organic material in the ground and let it rot.

 

I live in an affluent suburbia. I live in a seaside village that was once populated by fishermen, but is increasingly populated by ex-Manhattanites and ex-Brooklynites who fled the city with the pandemic. I live on the north shore of Long Island. I live on an island. It’s a big island but an island none-the-less. This means we’re bound by water; this suggests a sort of confinement. This means there’s not too much room to stretch to accommodate the growing population. This means more roads and more cars and more strip malls and more traffic and more traffic lights. This means more accidents more honks more burning fossil fuels more commerce. This means more chaos.

 

Pedestrians are killed in motor vehicle crashes in Nassau and Suffolk at the highest rate of any counties in New York State. [1]

 

See Lego sets and toilet paper and tape measures and sneakers in more than one size. See how the trucks stop not just at our house; see how they seem to stop at all houses. See the trucks out on the roads. See me too, out on the roads, shuttling kids to school and myself off to work, dodging delivery trucks with flashers parked on the sides of streets without shoulders. See all of us, accelerating and stopping and honking. See all of us zipping about; see all of us out on the roads.

 

In 2020, Long Island made up 15% of NY State’s population, but it accounted for 23% of all pedestrians killed in crashes. [2]

 

The fall before the pandemic, I returned to work full-time. My youngest child was two and I had been offered a full-time college teaching gig I couldn’t turn down. It was a significant transition. Instacart helped me return to work. Some of the hours I lost in commuting, I gained back in not having to push the giant cart at Costco. I gained back in not having to push the cart (with the kids) through the lot and pack the car and drive home and unpack the car (with the kids). Fewer hours, on my end, with the roads and cars and traffic lights. This offered me precious hours that aided my sense of personal survival: to cook, to clean, to read rhyming books aloud, to go for a walk, to sleep, to write.

 

Socks Box Knox /  Knox in box. / Fox in socks. / Knox on fox in socks in box. / Socks on Knox and Knox in box. / Fox in socks on box on Knox. [3]

 

There is a giant mound of dirt in the back corner of our one-fifth of an acre. We throw the boxes on top. Every couple weeks, my husband takes his backhoe tractor and digs a hole in the center; the boxes, still not fully broken down, get buried. I hate the diesel burning roar of the machine, but love to see the boxes submerged in the soil. They begin to decay and disintegrate, along with the leaves and straw and rotted jack-o’-lanterns and branches from the apple tree pruning. In addition to the boxes, the compost mound also swallows unused seedlings, the soil and stems from last year’s potted annuals, fire pit ashes, kitchen scraps. The backhoe bucket turns the mound and makes space for disintegration.

 

Boxwoods are a thick shrub, native to Europe and Asia, a member of the evergreen family. The wood has been versatile since antiquity, famed for being easy to carve yet durable and hard, able to endure. Boxwood has long been used for chess pieces and yard sticks, combs and woodwind instruments. Bagpipes and tuning pegs. And often, it was the wood carved for wood blocks, used to illustrate early books printed with movable type. And so, the etymology. The writing desk, the writing box. Small tablets or surfaces made of hardwood, fine for writing. Early boxes were made of boxwood, built to endure and protect. Suitable for use and re-use.

 

When the pandemic hit, grocery deliveries exploded. Every type of delivery exploded. We stayed home and let our essential worker delivery folks do their work. I discovered I didn’t necessarily need to schlep to Target for baby wipes and toilet paper. I discovered that if I spent thirty-five bucks, the delivery would be free and I would get a cardboard box in a few days with the goods I needed to keep the house running. I no longer needed to pack a kid into a car seat and wrangle with traffic. I discovered that instead, I could have the goods shipped and I could put the kids in the double-stroller and take a vigorous walk down to the seaside park and we could watch the boats. During that time, I wrote a chapbook of poems called Double Stroller Dreams. I discovered my enormous privilege, this opting out of the stores, this opting in to the deliveries. After our walks, I would sit on the porch and sip lemon water and jot lines in my journal, my nervous system regulated from huffing up hills and being filled with the brisk and open air. After I unpacked the groceries we couldn’t grow, the brown paper bags would make their way to the compost.

 

[On Long Island] Among the industries included in this report, the couriers and messengers industry had the second fastest growth rate (59.3%) between 2015 and 2020. It was second only to warehousing and storage. [4]

 

There’s a birthday party this weekend and we forgot to get a gift. Softball season starts on Saturday and last year’s cleats are too tight. We’re out of batteries. We need paint brushes for the PTA craft project. But wait, there’s an Amazon warehouse somewhere just a few miles away that has the right size softball cleats and they can be here tomorrow. In so many ways, we are the consumers we feared becoming.

 

And yet, there is compost to swallow the boxes. There is compost to return to the garden bed. There is me writing, on my box-desk (rescued out of someone else’s trash), on paper with ink that is also compostable. There is this unsightly mound of soil next to the swing set that is perhaps the sightliest thing we’ve created. And for the first time in fifteen years living in this village, I see a fox on my front lawn. It quickly darts across the street and disappears through the neighbors’ boxwood hedge. It is a sign of hope, a predator in a challenged ecosystem. My first fox, wild and free. I run upstairs to tell my son what I’ve seen. I see wonder in his eyes.

 

I ask my gardener husband, what is compost? He says, compost is the result of things being consumed. We consume to get the things that get consumed to make the compost.

 

It’s early November and the trees are on fire, all shades of citron and amber and ruby. They’re holding on, but soon, they too will send their rich carbon back down to earth. They’ll slime and smolder, becoming winter abodes for insects and other small beings in need of shelter and sustenance. I love how they blanket the compost, a patchwork quilt of deciduous stars warming the cold earth before they soon become it.

 

It proves a bit tricky to find out how many packages and boxes Amazon sends. On their website they’re more interested in talking about all the steps they are devising to reduce packaging even as their sales consistently increase each year. Google keeps pointing me back to one article in the “Curious Kids” section of The Conversation. Nine-year-old Aya from Illinois asks, “How many Amazon packages get delivered each year”? The answer Aya gets back from two environmental engineering PhDs states that in 2021, Amazon shipped an estimated 7.7 billion packages globally. The engineers explain, “If each of these packages were a 1-foot square box and they were stacked on top of one another, the pile would be six times higher than the distance from the Earth to the Moon. Laid end to end, they would wrap around the Earth 62 times.” [5]

 

Fox in the front yard, next to Amazon box. Fox runs through the neighbors’ boxwoods; box in the compost becomes soil used to feed the phlox. Fox and box and phlox; box and phlox and fox. Suburban systems bewildering me. Oh heaven, what would Thoreau think of me?

 

Thank God, I can sit and I can stand without the aid of a furniture warehouse. What man but a philosopher would not be ashamed to see his furniture packed in a cart and going up country exposed to the light of heaven and the eyes of men, a beggarly account of empty boxes?[6]

 

I am teaching Thoreau’s “Economy” and “Where I Lived and What I Lived For” in my U.S. Lit I survey this semester. I listen to an audio version in the car on my morning commute and find myself surprised when I start tearing up as his language sweeps over me. I reminisce on how when I was in graduate school, Thoreau helped me deflate from the theory and get grounded in the practice; I needed someone to show me how metaphor is alive in words and in earth. I needed a writer to remind me that my walking and my journaling were my scholarship and my art. These days, I need someone to help me look at my empty boxes. I need to take stock of all the stuff. In drafting Walden in his cabin in the mid 1840s, Thoreau used these words: warehouse, empty boxes, ashamed.

 

See fox in box. See one red fox and billions of boxes stacked to the moon and beyond and back. See my old Dover thrift paperback copy of Walden, with yellowed pages and faded post it note musings. See how it too could find a home in my compost, swallowed alongside the boxes and leaves.

 

At each moment, we are just one click away from consuming more. The answer is to consume less. The answer is also to compost more. To insist on packaging and products that are easily ready to transform in the compost. The answer is both within us and beyond us. But behold how the compost takes in some of our consumerism in the form of boxes, and from the rot, spears of onion.

 

Behold this compost! behold it well!

Perhaps every mite has once form’d part of a sick person—yet behold!

The grass of spring covers the prairies,

The bean bursts noiselessly through the mould in the garden,

The delicate spear of the onion pierces upward,, [7]

 

In 1881 Walt Whitman finalized a version of “This Compost” in his ever-expanding Leaves of Grass. Whitman’s poem is full of both wonder and terror as it confronts how the earth transforms organic material, including human carrion, into new life. The poem balances the paradoxes of regeneration: sick and rotting corpses become juicy blackberries. As Whitman writes, “Now I am terrified at the Earth, it is that calm and patient, /It grows such sweet things out of such corruptions.” What would Whitman think of plastic? How calm and patient must an earth be to grow sweet things out of such corruption. These days, even our corpses are full of plastic. In awe, Whitman exclaims the science of regeneration; “What chemistry!” He writes, “That all is clean forever and forever.” I wonder what time scales Whitman was fathoming. I wonder what Whitman would think of Styrofoam? Of forever chemicals?

 

It’s early November, and the stores have turned from Halloween to Christmas and delivery trucks are ramping up, new drivers are being hired and overtime hours are being scheduled. My daughter has begun a latch hook pillow of a ginger cat for me as a gift. Every night she hooks and ties pieces of yarn and I work on making holiday cards, while we both watch old re-runs of a show from the nineties. It will take her weeks to complete this gift for me. Her last gift for me, for my birthday, was a fired clay plaque of a tree and a bird that she spent assiduous weeks on in her art class. It occurs to me that both of these singular gifts, fibers and clay, laden with weeks of crafting, can also easily make their way back into the compost. It occurs to me that along with oxygen and hydrogen, the human heart contains both carbon and nitrogen. Just like compost.

 

Sometimes I throw my stacks of first drafts in the compost. Sometimes I throw old student essays with my notes in purple ink, which were never picked up at the end of the term, into the compost. Sometimes I stand in the corner of the yard and cry into the compost. Sometimes I throw my heart in the compost.

 

Sometimes such sweet things grow out of the compost.

 
 
 

Jesse Curran (she/her) is a writer and teacher who lives in Northport, NY. Her essays and poems have appeared in dozens of literary journals including About Place, After the Art, Literary Mama, Blueline, and The Denver Quarterly. She is an Assistant Professor in the Department of English at SUNY Old Westbury and is the 2025 Long Island Poet of the Year.

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Creative NonfictionJesse Curran