The Com Post

My pre-winery life involved lots of paper, as I completed 12 years of academic work in literature after high school and followed those years with semester after semester of teaching. Over and over again through the years, my students and I have filled page after page with words. Many of those printed pages have haunted me until very recently.

By "haunted," of course, I mean that every time Carl and I have moved, we've had to drag all of this printed paper along with us. For all of these decades and moves (including ten in our first ten years together!), I still hadn't been able to get rid of very much of the paper because I wasn't sure where it ultimately fit into my life. All of that academic scholarship, both on my part and then the work of my students, ranging in age (through the years) from third grade through grandparents, burdened, but I wasn't sure what to do with the artifacts because I wasn't sure if I was done with that part of my life. To steal a literary metaphor, was I ready to close those chapters?

The delicious response to that question, FINALLY, has been YES! This spring I've found myself with enough clarity about different facets of my life to be able to have one of the greatest gifts of maturing as a human, which is discernment. In the cold early months of this year, I purged and shredded and purged and shredded.

Fortuitously, as my academic career took its place firmly in my life's rear-view, I began a new practice to, ahem, fertilize future projects: I started to learn about composting! I now have two double-barrel compost bins 1/3 full of kitchen waste and 2/3 full of--you guessed it--the shredded compositions of bygone days of scholarship and teaching. Seems quite fitting that old literature and rhetoric assignments are finally truly being recognized for their bullshit qualities!