Hard to believe, I've been blogging for nearly ten years. Usually, my approach has been to reflect something that has attracted my attention during the day. Sometimes, all I have available is a piece of very dark material. I've learned that if I pause, and keep living my life, the dark material passes by, and something else will come to the foreground. My preference is to reflect the beautiful or quirky or humorous over the painful.

After moving into this house at the end of the summer, I began experimenting with composting as a means of re-establishing the living process of good soil. I'm not a gardener, so I had no plans for the compost. I just wanted to see what would happen if I dug shallow holes in dry, powdery earth that had no worms or ants or fungal matter evident, and started adding discarded fruit and vegetable remains. Each deposit of kitchen scraps was then covered with a light layer of the dirt and leaves.

It's been amazing how quickly coffee grounds, potato, apple and banana peels, mushroom stems, eggshells, and old lettuce have melded with hard dirt and transformed into something crumbly and rich. A friend's recommendation to add a small quantity of water as I add new material has hastened the process even more. A couple of worms and elongated beetles even showed up.

So today, with an area perhaps six by two feet with a healthy working chain of life established, we were ready when a large, chopped up victim of an unhappy landscaping and lawn maintenance event showed up. The tropical plant may or may not survive, but it's now transplanted to a nourishing space that may be exactly what it needs to heal, as though these past few months, we've been preparing a bed for this particular arrival, for just this day.