The Mysterious Smell -- by Kiki Clark

I have a mysterious smell in my kitchen. Well, not so mysterious. There's some deteriorating produce in my refrigerator that I need to take out to the compost. The problem is, the compost is buried under snow. The trash is not. In fact, I can open the garage door and there's the can. I don't even have to wear snow boots. So why don't I just throw the compostables in the trash? Because I'd feel guilty. There are good nutrients in those rotting leeks and celery. If they go in a landfill, along with dead batteries and cans of Raid, those nutrients will be lost to farming, probably forever. I'd be starving the earth!

The other possibility, in this month of below freezing temperatures, is to put these vegetable remnants in a bag and stash them on the deck, out of reach of the raccoons. There's already a bag of compostables out there, in fact. So far, I've drawn the line at two bags, which seems one step away from storing a defunct toilet on your porch until you can locate a place that will take it. I think we may have done that once, or maybe it was a dream. Either way, I'd like to avoid that slippery slope.

So the mysterious smell is still there, because making an exception -- throwing away compost this one time -- seems like it would make me a bad person, part of the problem and not the solution. Which is stupid. Doing something questionable once doesn't make me bad. Well, unless we're talking about murder, which is a pretty digital situation.

What I should do is review Stephanie Rowe's article on how the state of your home affects your mood. Then I'll go throw out the celery. I understand it's pretty nutritionally void, anyway. The earth may not miss it. I certainly won't.

posted by Esri Rose @ 3:12 PM