Knee deep... yes.
It was an evening. I often find that being precise about dates is... hard, but on this evening, I must have been working as a caretaker at the community garden for almost a year. It was autumn, and we were awash in leaf litter, dead annual plants, and spoiled harvests. As such, our compost bins were full to the brim.
We have an "anything goes" sort of approach for the garden's compost: If it was alive at some point, in it goes, stacked into the great, yawning maw of the first bin in the line. Bring us your branches, cardboards, your fish heads, your yogurts. I know a lot of gardens are more restrictive, mostly in the name of preventing odours and reducing the likelihood of pests. We lean in the opposite direction: the more variety, the faster and more completely it all breaks down.
By that evening, we had five large compost bins, all in a row — an expansion over the four we'd had when I first started working here. It's a simple system: when the first bin is full and had sat for a while, it's turned out into the second bin to mix it all up and make way for more — and so on all the way down the line, ending with the fith. Full of rich, garden-ready dirt.
I’ve always found dirt fascinating for the role it plays in the vast, roiling ball of life we call home. All the results of decades of organic toil, breaking our remnants down into food for the growing, crawling, squirming things that make up the foundation of just about every ecosystem. I love what it does for us. I am fascinated by what happens when, as with the Dust bowl, it balks under the plough, unable to yield any more fertility. Unwilling, perhaps.
Before I worked here in the garden, as a caretaker, I maintained my own; a few climbing vines, potted succulents, some flowers. It wasn't much, but the regular cycle of composting, trimming, pruning, and pest removal marked the passing of time. It was grounding, a welcome alternative to the endless precession of near-identical days I would have otherwise trudged through at my series of grinding jobs, each one only differing in the particular anxiety dreams they gave me.
Gardening can be fraught with frustrations and anxieties. Pests were an unwelcome frustration, an intrusion into my little garden-based escape. They featured sometimes in my anxiety dreams too, but they never ate at me with the same pervasiveness.
That is, until I started working here. In the community garden. It paid a bit worse and offered fewer hours than whatever casualised retail hellhole I had unceremoniously left, and, as with all jobs I'd ever had, the anxiety dreams began almost immediately: the sticky-sweet residue of aphid secretions coating shriveled plants, the hundreds of crawling feet and snipping jaws of scavengers and micro-predators, swarming and crawling, burying me knee-deep in their mass...
But it was just dreams, and dirt was just dirt. They were just other parts of nature, doing their job. They had their place. It was a nice garden and a nice job, so I stuck it out. All I really had to do was make sure the plot borders were respected, maintain all the edgings, and keep an eye on weeds and pests. Before long, I found that there was something hypnotic about crouching amongst the plants, watching them sway in the breeze, picking off inchworms and slugs with sudden darting movements. It soothed my pest-based dreams, so I often stayed back, unpaid, picking and swaying. Losing hours at a time playing predator, dirt on my knees... part of the garden's ecosystem.
This habit of quiet predation grew into a ritual, a meditation, part of my routine. Before long, i was sleeping better than I ever had. Almost no anxiety dreams at all. Almost — it did give me a new kind of dream: being chased through the garden by a misshapen pursuer. Branches slapped at my face, my breath heaved, I scrambled over gnarled knots of roots reaching out to grab me and pull me deep into the dirt. I was covered in it, smeared all over with damp, slick mud, clumps falling away as I fled, marking my trail as something trod calmly after me, closer, ever closer, a heaving mass that had climbed forth from the earth itself to give chase and catch me and-
As time went on the dreams scared me less and less. They became almost comforting. I think... because, unlike my previous dreams, they did not mirror the fears of my waking hours. Awake, I was the predator. Asleep, reverberations of the prey rippled through my mind. People attribute a kind of... smug satisfaction to hunter animals. A gleeful, cathartic bloodlust, adjacent to sadism. This wasn't that — strange to say, but... it was empathy, almost. No regret. A resolute satisfaction, a rightness. The smooth victory of a puzzle piece, slipping into place. It is what it is, as it should be.
Not everyone shares my fascination with nature, let alone dirt. I learned pretty quickly that people don't like to think about how compost is made. Don't have the stomach for it. Think it's all malodourous rot and decay. In reality, it's quiet. It's dark velvet, rustling in the dark. The worst it ever gets is dropped-off bags full of isolated rot. The worst is meat, dripping with miscelaneous fluids, sliding out of plastic and flopping onto the heap like something spat out by a heaving, diseased monster. Still, by the time even this repugnance has sat for a month in the first bin, it is far closer to dirt than decay. By the time it reaches the fifth bin, all you have to do is sift out the bones and thick branches, and you have yourself just about the best soil you were ever going to get. You would never know what it used to be.
Dirt. Up to the knees. Right.
It had been a year since I became the caretaker. That's where I started this story, right? Yes, I remember. I was turning out the fifth, final bin, heaving up the heavy, black lid. A wave of warmth billowed out; I remember, so vividly, how welcome that warmth was. I was used to the bins producing a lot of heat as they broke things down, but that evening it seemed almost hot. Standing there, hand on the edge, I stared into the full bin, into the rich, black, soft soil. It was so warm, so inviting, and I relished the chance to slip off a glove and dig my hand into that wonderful substrate. It felt, as usual and of all the places in the world, like home. Like I could step right in. It felt to me as it must to the plants that surround us.
There was a crash, somewhere in the garden, and my trance was broken. I turned to look, stumbled. For a moment, I couldn't see anything at all, could hardly move. Then my eyes adjusted, and I realized the sky had gone dark, and I had been standing there for at least an hour, enraptured as the sun went down, having stepped across a threshold. I was up to my knees in that inky-dark richness.
The crash came again, followed by a whoop — someone, some damned pest, was wrecking the garden. Reckless in their untouchable arrogance. They careened around the side of the bins, baseball bat in hand, and stopped dead. They were young. So young.
Imagine being so sure you were alone, cocksure and power-drunk on your newfound knowledge that you can do damage to things with your own two hands. Imagine the elation of exercising this power, relishing the feeling and freedom this power gives you — and then, rounding a corner and seeing, silhouetted against the moon, a terrible, lumpen figure rise from inside a bin you *know* should be full of nothing but dirt, soil cascading from its hands and feet as it clambers out over the rim.
Towards you.
They ran, and I gave chase. It felt right. Dreamlike. Branches slapped at them, their breath heaved, they scrambled, smeared all over with damp, slick mud, clumps falling away as they fled, marking their trail as something trod calmly after, closer, ever closer, then-
When it was over, I went back to the bins and sunk back in, deeper than knee deep.
It has been... some time more than a year since I started working at the garden. I am dreaming new dreams almost all of the time, now — or at least, there is such little difference between working and dreaming that I cannot tell the difference. I dream, and the earth dreams with me — if there is still a difference between the two.
They still do try and hire new caretakers, pests, occasionally, but they never last long. This is my garden and I do the work, even if they don’t know I’m here. Maybe they lie to themselves. Maybe they tell themselves that other people chip in behind the scenes. Most people do not like to think about how compost is made.
Sometimes they transgress, and then these pests turn to see me and blanch in horror, cowering before a roiling darkness that seethes up from the dirt, that is the dirt, with no end or separation. This is my garden, and my work is mine to do, not theirs. They contribute in their own way, though. The dark, rich soil is always hungry, and this is, in all ways, a community garden.
It was an evening. I often find that being precise about dates is... hard, but on this evening, I must have been working as a caretaker at the community garden for almost a year. It was autumn, and we were awash in leaf litter, dead annual plants, and spoiled harvests. As such, our compost bins were full to the brim.
We have an "anything goes" sort of approach for the garden's compost: If it was alive at some point, in it goes, stacked into the great, yawning maw of the first bin in the line. Bring us your branches, cardboards, your fish heads, your yogurts. I know a lot of gardens are more restrictive, mostly in the name of preventing odours and reducing the likelihood of pests. We lean in the opposite direction: the more variety, the faster and more completely it all breaks down.
By that evening, we had five large compost bins, all in a row — an expansion over the four we'd had when I first started working here. It's a simple system: when the first bin is full and had sat for a while, it's turned out into the second bin to mix it all up and make way for more — and so on all the way down the line, ending with the fith. Full of rich, garden-ready dirt.
I’ve always found dirt fascinating for the role it plays in the vast, roiling ball of life we call home. All the results of decades of organic toil, breaking our remnants down into food for the growing, crawling, squirming things that make up the foundation of just about every ecosystem. I love what it does for us. I am fascinated by what happens when, as with the Dust bowl, it balks under the plough, unable to yield any more fertility. Unwilling, perhaps.
Before I worked here in the garden, as a caretaker, I maintained my own; a few climbing vines, potted succulents, some flowers. It wasn't much, but the regular cycle of composting, trimming, pruning, and pest removal marked the passing of time. It was grounding, a welcome alternative to the endless precession of near-identical days I would have otherwise trudged through at my series of grinding jobs, each one only differing in the particular anxiety dreams they gave me.
Gardening can be fraught with frustrations and anxieties. Pests were an unwelcome frustration, an intrusion into my little garden-based escape. They featured sometimes in my anxiety dreams too, but they never ate at me with the same pervasiveness.
That is, until I started working here. In the community garden. It paid a bit worse and offered fewer hours than whatever casualised retail hellhole I had unceremoniously left, and, as with all jobs I'd ever had, the anxiety dreams began almost immediately: the sticky-sweet residue of aphid secretions coating shriveled plants, the hundreds of crawling feet and snipping jaws of scavengers and micro-predators, swarming and crawling, burying me knee-deep in their mass...
But it was just dreams, and dirt was just dirt. They were just other parts of nature, doing their job. They had their place. It was a nice garden and a nice job, so I stuck it out. All I really had to do was make sure the plot borders were respected, maintain all the edgings, and keep an eye on weeds and pests. Before long, I found that there was something hypnotic about crouching amongst the plants, watching them sway in the breeze, picking off inchworms and slugs with sudden darting movements. It soothed my pest-based dreams, so I often stayed back, unpaid, picking and swaying. Losing hours at a time playing predator, dirt on my knees... part of the garden's ecosystem.
This habit of quiet predation grew into a ritual, a meditation, part of my routine. Before long, i was sleeping better than I ever had. Almost no anxiety dreams at all. Almost — it did give me a new kind of dream: being chased through the garden by a misshapen pursuer. Branches slapped at my face, my breath heaved, I scrambled over gnarled knots of roots reaching out to grab me and pull me deep into the dirt. I was covered in it, smeared all over with damp, slick mud, clumps falling away as I fled, marking my trail as something trod calmly after me, closer, ever closer, a heaving mass that had climbed forth from the earth itself to give chase and catch me and-
As time went on the dreams scared me less and less. They became almost comforting. I think... because, unlike my previous dreams, they did not mirror the fears of my waking hours. Awake, I was the predator. Asleep, reverberations of the prey rippled through my mind. People attribute a kind of... smug satisfaction to hunter animals. A gleeful, cathartic bloodlust, adjacent to sadism. This wasn't that — strange to say, but... it was empathy, almost. No regret. A resolute satisfaction, a rightness. The smooth victory of a puzzle piece, slipping into place. It is what it is, as it should be.
Not everyone shares my fascination with nature, let alone dirt. I learned pretty quickly that people don't like to think about how compost is made. Don't have the stomach for it. Think it's all malodourous rot and decay. In reality, it's quiet. It's dark velvet, rustling in the dark. The worst it ever gets is dropped-off bags full of isolated rot. The worst is meat, dripping with miscelaneous fluids, sliding out of plastic and flopping onto the heap like something spat out by a heaving, diseased monster. Still, by the time even this repugnance has sat for a month in the first bin, it is far closer to dirt than decay. By the time it reaches the fifth bin, all you have to do is sift out the bones and thick branches, and you have yourself just about the best soil you were ever going to get. You would never know what it used to be.
Dirt. Up to the knees. Right.
It had been a year since I became the caretaker. That's where I started this story, right? Yes, I remember. I was turning out the fifth, final bin, heaving up the heavy, black lid. A wave of warmth billowed out; I remember, so vividly, how welcome that warmth was. I was used to the bins producing a lot of heat as they broke things down, but that evening it seemed almost hot. Standing there, hand on the edge, I stared into the full bin, into the rich, black, soft soil. It was so warm, so inviting, and I relished the chance to slip off a glove and dig my hand into that wonderful substrate. It felt, as usual and of all the places in the world, like home. Like I could step right in. It felt to me as it must to the plants that surround us.
There was a crash, somewhere in the garden, and my trance was broken. I turned to look, stumbled. For a moment, I couldn't see anything at all, could hardly move. Then my eyes adjusted, and I realized the sky had gone dark, and I had been standing there for at least an hour, enraptured as the sun went down, having stepped across a threshold. I was up to my knees in that inky-dark richness.
The crash came again, followed by a whoop — someone, some damned pest, was wrecking the garden. Reckless in their untouchable arrogance. They careened around the side of the bins, baseball bat in hand, and stopped dead. They were young. So young.
Imagine being so sure you were alone, cocksure and power-drunk on your newfound knowledge that you can do damage to things with your own two hands. Imagine the elation of exercising this power, relishing the feeling and freedom this power gives you — and then, rounding a corner and seeing, silhouetted against the moon, a terrible, lumpen figure rise from inside a bin you *know* should be full of nothing but dirt, soil cascading from its hands and feet as it clambers out over the rim.
Towards you.
They ran, and I gave chase. It felt right. Dreamlike. Branches slapped at them, their breath heaved, they scrambled, smeared all over with damp, slick mud, clumps falling away as they fled, marking their trail as something trod calmly after, closer, ever closer, then-
When it was over, I went back to the bins and sunk back in, deeper than knee deep.
It has been... some time more than a year since I started working at the garden. I am dreaming new dreams almost all of the time, now — or at least, there is such little difference between working and dreaming that I cannot tell the difference. I dream, and the earth dreams with me — if there is still a difference between the two.
They still do try and hire new caretakers, pests, occasionally, but they never last long. This is my garden and I do the work, even if they don’t know I’m here. Maybe they lie to themselves. Maybe they tell themselves that other people chip in behind the scenes. Most people do not like to think about how compost is made.
Sometimes they transgress, and then these pests turn to see me and blanch in horror, cowering before a roiling darkness that seethes up from the dirt, that is the dirt, with no end or separation. This is my garden, and my work is mine to do, not theirs. They contribute in their own way, though. The dark, rich soil is always hungry, and this is, in all ways, a community garden.