Compost pile

Our compost pile has some good features, and some bad ones. On the good side, it's very easy to dump stuff into it, I just walk out onto my deck and throw stuff down. On the negative, it's hard to flip the matter that's in there, so it takes forever to break down, and gets really dense, and never makes it to the magical fluffiness that we achieved in Princeton in our composting wheel. Nor do I get the magnificent steaming of the pile when I flipped it with a pitchfork.

I could replicate what I had in Princeton, but it would have go out into the back of the yard, which would make taking stuff out there much more of an ideal.

But would that be so bad? There was something magical about taking the compost into the yard in Princeton. Probably it was bound up with the improbability of our yard, of having that much land (about a third of an acre) right there in town, particularly when the stand of trees was still there, before our legal tussles with the Barskys over their planned development, which eventually ended in the felling of all the trees and their building four McMansions across the fence from us.* Our yard felt like a mythical space, particularly if I had just come home from Manhattan or had flown back from Nebraska or something. Kind of like the great woods behind Glen Heights, but on a much smaller scale. And, in the back of my mind, I knew that both Sir Thomas Kuhn and Aaron Burr had -- at different times, obviously -- lived just on the other side of the woods, lending them a certain allure.

Don't get me wrong, my current backyard is also pretty cool. But the experience of it differs, probably by the fact our home is much more open to the natural environment here, so the inside/outside distinction is lessened. In general, we got more of it here in NC. New Jersey is really the Garden State only in its mind.



*This struggle is probably at some level narrated back in the 2004-2005 entries in the Grouse, but it is not easily keyword findable, and I don't have time to go spelunking for it.