Kneeling on the footpath, I reach into the compost bin’s furthest innards to pull the food waste to me, my averted eyes able to sweeten the moment because through the backlit trees and cars the western sun is going down, beautifully.
• Food ‘waste’ mixed with shredded newspaper about to go into one of Chippendale’s bench seat compost gardens.
The other side of the road holds the street library, bold white, its back to the road between us, respected, it seems, by the looping paw paw tree and pomegranate on one side and brave, unusual-for-a-city-road fruit trees on the other.
Loving and observing downpipes and drains as I do for their work and variety, I see the gutters either side of the road are bone dry and I see them well, too, through a wall of cars, tyres, ready parking spaces and yet more leaves across everything always dropping from the overhanging trees. Such silly things, road gutters, evidence of systemic engineering mindlessness and lack of curiosity. Precious water wasted, like food 'waste'.
The road is like all such here, each named after the settler migrant people, crops and food grown here when the white conquerors came and needed a food garden for their newly arrived bellies; Myrtle, Pine, Shepherd, Meagher, Rose, . . .
I’ve filled the bucket now with food waste, and in me I feel hope, for soon it will become soil composted in our road garden bench seats to nurture the paw paw trees, and all we grow here.
Will all this matter in the long run, I ask?
It’s better to run out of answers than questions and at this difficult moment for us all in this little street and our big Earth I feel calmed by the circle of decay and growth that steadies me here, and which I’m part of, on my knees.
Michael