The Worms Crawl In
Peter B. Steiger
02/02/01

Maybe I'm not quite ready for the adjustment from city life to rural life.
Somehow I just couldn't get excited when Irene ran in this morning with the
mail shouting "The worms are here!"

It started a few weeks ago when Sylvia started reading up on composting.
She's still convinced that we'll somehow be able to build a house on our
land outside of town - about 8 acres of hillside overlooking some cows.  So
once in a while she'll start researching various topics from "Rural Living
For Dummies".  In theory, at least, we know how to build a septic system, an
irrigation system (hopefully not using the same pipes), and a snow fence
made of trees that we bought wholesale from a conservation group.  The trees
are only a foot tall or so, but any minute now they'll burst into a
veritable forest around our nonexistent house.

So anyway, all of a sudden Sylvia got the idea that we should build a
compost heap for our paper trash.  As the official spokes-Lorax for the
reduction of landfills, I'm all for anything that doesn't involve throwing
trash into a big hole in the earth... but throwing trash into a big pile in
our yard doesn't strike me as much of an improvement.  We tried composting
once before, in Dallas, but that didn't work out too well because Sylvia
hadn't read all this composting literature and we were both too lazy to
maintain it, so we ended up with bags full of newspapers still piled up
intact three years later when we left Dallas.  I'm sure that has nothing to
do with the fact that not only did we not get our deposit back, but the
landlord refused to return any of our messages.

This time it's going to be different, says Sylvia.  For the last few weeks
she has been bursting with more excitement than I have seen in her since the
time Kevin ("Hercules") Sorbo had a guest appearance on Penn & Teller's
magic show.  Periodically my hard work, which consists largely of cursing at
my computer, would be interrupted by shouts of glee as she read something
incredible about the power of rotting vegetables.  If this literature is to
be believed, you can simply pour all your paper and food trash into a big
pile and by the next morning you'll have 7 tons of compost, bagged and ready
to distribute to your garden where you can grow more vegetables to throw in
the compost heap.  All part of the circle of life, I guess.

All this is made possible by worms.  It turns out the critters don't eat
dirt at all!  Worms thrive on paper and food scraps; throughout history the
smarter rural settlers would keep a family of pet worms trained to beg at
the table for leftovers.  So we sent off for a worm kit and I was dispatched
on an emergency errand to Wal-Mart to buy an aquarium.  As it happens, half
the streets were closed due to unexpected ice buildup ("who would have ever
expected freezing weather in Wyoming?" the meterologists were all asking one
another) so I had to slide around some back roads to fulfill my part of this
epic project.  Years from now I'm sure I'll look back and laugh about the
time I nearly broke both legs skidding through a Wal-Mart parking lot so my
wife could make a nice home for her worms.

The big day came when we got a huge package from UPS straight from
Worms-R-Us.  It was about 19 feet long, most of which turned out to be
packing used to protect the incredibly fragile slip of paper which read
"Here is a handy thermometer to measure the heat of your worm poop.  Worms
are being shipped separately."

That's what Irene just brought in a little while ago.  We all gathered
around the aquarium, already stocked with shredded paper we have collected
over the past week, and watched Sylvia snip open a bag and pour out... a
mound of dirt.  For a long time nobody said anything, then Daniel remarked
"I think I heard something moving".  How he could hear a worm crawling
through dirt when he can't hear us bellowing for him to clean up his room on
Saturday morning is anybody's guess, but it wasn't long before a single
worm, about three inches long, weakly squirmed out of the mass of dirt.

I had long since given up on the proceedings - I like to put in a few
minutes worth of work each day just to keep my boss guessing - but from what
I could hear the rest of the family remained huddled around the aquarium for
the next half hour, eagerly waiting to see the worms start chewing their
slimy way through the paper and depositing the highly anticipated compost.
They may be there a while.  As the old adage goes, "A watched worm never
poops."

Maybe while they wait they can gather outside and watch the grass grow.