Poo-poo

So it’s almost a full moon tonight and I’m shoveling poo.  A whole truckload of it.  All of Dolly’s finest manure - piled high in the field all summer long, baking out any larvae and bugs that the chickens didn’t scratch, and ripening to perfection - is now going to become part of my food.

It’s cold outside, it smells pretty funky, as one would imagine, and it’s a bit backbreaking, this shoveling of re-purposed plant matter.  The odd thing is, I’m enjoying it.  I find myself in a sort of Zen trance as I rake, pitchfork, shovel, wheel-barrow and spread cow poop all over my strawberries, asparagus, raspberries, blueberries and all the open beds that are resting from summer’s abundant production.  I get lost thinking about other cow poo uses – house walls, fire bricks, insulation - and I'm in a poop-sorting rhythm… aged, crumbly stuff goes here, still-fresh-n-sticky goes there.  Sometimes I come across a ball of red wigglers and know they must be doing their worm magic by breaking down organic matter into rich humus and I think “oh goodie!”  And then I see a whole chicken egg buried in the brown mass.  What?!  Oh yeah - must be one of the eggs that never hatched that got thrown in with the chicken droppings as I cleaned the chicken house.  As I move my rake over the pile, a loud “POP!” sounds and within a second, I almost vomit.  That egg from late July had turned into a sulfur bomb and I kid you not, I think they must use this stuff in warfare.  Holy cow!  Hydrogen Sulfide is so crazy powerful to the olfactory senses!  Wowzer! 

I need to get all of the poo out of the back of the dump bed in case it rains, so I keep truckin’, stench in my nose.  Wheel barrow load after wheel barrow load, I feel a bit excited knowing my soil is being rejuvenated with organic and natural nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium.  I wonder for a minute about the economic aspect of saving poo from our cow – the whole chain of events that leads to this (working a job to have money to buy, feed and house cow… spend time feeding, milking, cleaning stalls… spend time shoveling poo… ) – but then remember it’s about the connectivity to the circle I’m after, not just the parts. If I wanted “quick,” I’d live in the city, drive a sports car to my high-paying job and buy my food at a grocery store.

I’m done spreading and think I should get to covering the beds and plants with fallen leaves before it rains so as to help slow the leaching of nutrients and also to prevent our dogs from dumpster-diving (why is it they like to eat poop again?)  I head into the house and see Dan has begun to cook dinner which includes some of our winter garden fair – chives, spinach, carrots – and I think about how next summer’s tomatoes, corn and potatoes – the heavy feeders – will be set now that I am done with my poo-pile conversion.

A bit later, it’s time to tuck Daisy into bed and she brings me a book I haven’t seen in her pile of books, or maybe I skipped over it due to it being a little too long to hold her attention until now.  “There’s a Hair in My Dirt” by Gary Larson.   I start to read it and realize, one, it’s awesome, and two, it’s not really aimed at 4-year olds, but Daisy insists, so I skip the rated PG parts in my oral narration.   She loves the surface story  - that of a worm-child that finds a hair in his dinner of dirt (and subsequently is totally bummed out by his lowly lot in life), combined with a sub-story of a nature-loving-maiden, and the blending of the two to offer some enlightenment of what really goes on in nature.  Larson is brilliant and offers me just the dose of humor and realism I needed for post-poo affirmation.  Don’t skip the book, as it’s too fun to miss, but I’ll offer up a portion of the forward that sings to my heart, transcends belief systems and motivates me to dig deeper in the dirt and search out authentic ways to fully embrace my part in the big cycle:

  “Nature is Part of us and we are part of nature…We are subject to the same physical laws, still tied to the planet, totally enmeshed in food webs, energy flows, nutrient cycles, predator-prey cycles, territorial imperatives, and even slavery of other species, such as cows and dogs.  Nature is to be loved, cherished, admired, and yes, poetically celebrated…but above all, understood.”  ~ Edward Wilson (an amazing individual!)