. . . Now I am terrified at the Earth, it is that calm and patient,
It grows such sweet things out of such corruptions,
It turns harmless and stainless on its axis, with such endless successions of diseas'd corpses,
It distills such exquisite winds out of such infused fetor,
It renews with such unwitting looks its prodigal, annual, sumptuous crops,
It gives such divine materials to men, and accepts such leavings from them at last.

~ Walt Whitman, excerpt from “This Compost”

The dogs wanted a long ramble this morning and they got it. The woods were dry, the sky was blue, it was later in the morning, after the mists, and I found the enchanted tree covered in moss and fern that I love to stop and look at on a windy rocky part of the path, high, overlooking the Charles, in Rocky Narrows. And I kept walking and looking and hoping to be charmed, to feel the quickening of inspiration I feel when something seems to be looking for me. I felt a bit flat, tired, uninspired and kept going, making the sniffing dogs happy. I crossed my yard, out of the woods, to head toward the house and had an impulse: go see the compost pumpkin patch and see how everything is coming along. That’s where I found the inspiration and beauty and fascination and delight of my walk. The vines grown crazed from the compost, some seeds of throw aways, wildly overtaking that part of the edge of the lawn and crawling up the trees even, to dangle: pumpkins and gourds and squash and strange beasts of vegetables. I remembered the enchanted tree and felt it did stir up some magic in me. Today was a packing and organizing day, hiding my suitcase, trying to, from Suzi and Charlie who won’t want me to go away tomorrow for the weekend. It’s our annual IWWG Board Retreat at the Wellfleet home of our Board Chair. The newlyweds stop by and take the dogs for a visit, a romp, in the afternoon, and the house is unsettled, strangely, eerily quiet in the absence of their breath and tails wagging. Will they miss my breath, my wagging? Two of the writers from last night’s critique group write warm and appreciative e-mails this morning – how much they appreciated our time, what they gained, from last night. This afternoon I’m stunned by the richness and scope of the Whitman poem, above, on the theme of compost and I am letting it sink in and illuminate so much more from my own compost patch that I had not considered. Last November, or was it December, I must have thrown the rotten, ugly jack-o-lantern carcasses into this pile of leaf and yard and garden waste. On my lawn beside the deck I have been tossing into a pile the rotting flowers from the arrangements for the wedding: the gardenias and sunflowers and roses and hydrangea. They will go in one sweep into the compost, so we shall see, next year, what germinates and flowers and sprouts and spreads.