Wilma is Alive! (and Other Covid Ruminations)

I stopped counting the days, or weeks during this wild time.

Instead, I started really plugging into the stuff that makes me feel whole; and for the most part, that comes from my childhood. So forgive me for the constant farm stories, or shenanigans about the past, but (I think) there’s some funny stuff in there that resurfaces in my memory in the most random of moments.

It’s been just over a year since we moved to Sacramento, and we live in a 3-story town house with a 4th floor rooftop. I got a wild hair one night that we should start a roof top compost, and it seemed really easy. When I was a kid we had a plastic milk jug cut off at the top and we filled it with “sheep slop” that we’d toss into the pasture and anything else that was compostable, but the stuff sheep wouldn’t eat, we’d toss into this fenced off area at the edge of the pasture. Everything always broke down nicely and we had divine dirt to use on the garden each Spring. I have no idea why I thought I could re-create this in a 2-foot plastic bin in the middle of the city, but, as with most things, I’m full of hope and expectation.

So I took an old plastic bin from moving, poked holes in the lid, lined the bottom with newspaper and proper dirt, and then started filling it with eggshells, clementine peels, lettuce leaves, etc. I named her Wilma. And I took great care to make sure I fed her every night, added a little water, and told her a story or two about my day.

Months passed….nothing. The egg shells were still in full halves, the clementines were withered, but not breaking down, and it smelled to high heaven and was full of disgusting moving things that I’m quite sure weren’t actually good for the dirt or the flowers I wanted to fertilize.

Meanwhile, my husband Nicholas is kind of a city slicker, and thought this whole idea was ridiculous, but after a few months, I heard him reference my compost by her proper name, and my zest was renewed.

My compost’s namesake is not out of disrespect, but an ode to one of the sassiest women I’ll likely ever know. My great Aunt Wilma was the most independent woman I ever knew in the AC church (Apostolic Christian) and if you knew or met her, you were lucky. In a time when independence for women wasn’t the norm, she marched to her own drum, was full of saucy opinions, and while I’m quite sure she she was raised to be silent and bite her tongue, she certainly did not. She was always dressed to the nines with a beautiful suit and matching brooch, and while single, hometown gossip said she had multiple proposals that she’d turned down. I don’t think I knew anyone else who never married and was a career woman in the world I grew up in, but she worked for Caterpillar for 70-ish years, and had her own apartment in Peoria before moving to the duplexes in Eureka, which is the only place I ever knew and visited.

She lived to be 104 (I think? I’ll have my mom edit if that’s wrong) but I remember she was 100 and still passed her driving test and was rolling around town like she was a teen. No one could tell her what to do, even when it came to re-using a napkin with someone’s gum in it. She had this wooden napkin holder on the table with used napkins from folks all over the country; while she was all fancy with her rolled hair and matching suit, she was busting out recycled items every chance she got. You never knew if you were going to get a napkin with gum, snot, crumbs, or just mild wrinkles that she had freshly flattened. She saved everything. And recycled everything. Most folks in my world saved things in a similar way, but also had standards about used napkins. Not so much Aunt Wilma.

So you get the name—what better praise for a strong, wild woman in my life than to name the compost after her? In this way, she’ll always be alive to me.

And ALIVE she is! During Covid-19, I’ve spent a good amount of time on the roof, and one night I realized that Wilma’s pink lid had popped open, which is odd, because the lid has those snap down handles that are super tight. But this strong-willed woman busted those handles wide open and there was a full-on head of lettuce growing in the middle of the compost. I was in awe and picked a leaf, smelled it, took a bite, and then looked down to see the bugs and eggshells still in the dirt and decided that wasn’t a great idea for my gut health, but how rad is that to have a head of lettuce from Wilma??