It turns out that if you live long enough, you really do turn into your parents.
I spent decades in full flight from certain practices that prevailed in my childhood homes. Never would I impale avocado pits on toothpicks and suspend them in a glass of water by the sink in the hopes that they’d germinate, as my mother did.
Never ever would I save eggshells and peelings in a countertop receptacle in order to tip them later into some repulsive decomposing heap, as was my father’s custom.
Mine would be a home free of plant-based ickiness. The fact that gift-houseplants died with unusual swiftness when they came to live with me confirmed my belief that the general muck of the garden — muck and glory beloved in my family for generations — was not for me.
So I was almost as surprised as my husband was, when the large black plastic box appeared on our front porch.
“What’s that?”
“Oh! Why, it’s a box of worms.”
“You ordered a box of worms?”
Reader, I had indeed ordered a box of worms. One day not long ago when the stock market was crashing, I had glanced at the depleted soil around our rosebushes and felt what must have been a genetic twinge from my green-thumbed ancestry.
“Be thrifty…” went the message, more or less. “Compost your kitchen scraps and you won’t have to buy fertilizer…”
I was shaken, I tell you. It was like hearing the voice of a ghost.
We brought the box inside. My husband and teenaged daughter watched incredulously for a moment, and then left me to it. The other children threw themselves into the task of ripping sheets of newspaper into shreds so that we could moisten them and create a worm farm into which I would throw vegetable peelings, and from which I could eventually harvest super-nutritious soil for my roses.
“That’s not so bad, see?” I said to the children, as I sprinkled the contents of the small cardboard worm box over the damp nests of newsprint. Soil sifted down, carrying an occasional worm at which I did not wish to look too closely. Then suddenly, a big pink clump fell out, right on top. It looked like a brain. It looked like a writhing brain made of worms.
“Bleaugh!” cried everyone, leaping away.
“I’m glad we’re not having spaghetti for dinner,” the 12-year-old boy gagged.
“Oh, gross!” yelled his little sisters.
“Listen,” I said, hastily consulting my paperback guide to vermiculture while gulping down nausea, “We need to put a bright light on the worms so that they’ll burrow down.”
The children and I exchanged commiserating winces, and dragged the box with its horrific cargo underneath a hallway light. No one wanted to spend any time with the worms. I hardly dared look at the thing, and wondered what on earth I’d been thinking.
Later that evening, my husband drifted down to the kitchen.
“Tell me about your worms,” he said, nodding at the black box. “For instance, how much did you pay for– that?”
“They’re not my worms, they’re everyone’s worms!” I said magnanimously. “The children have been asking for a pet.”
Plus, I explained, it really was all exceedingly thrifty. No more wasting leftovers or good, clean potato skins: We’d feed ‘em to the worms. The worms could live in the basement. No one would ever have to see them. Indeed, no one could see them now; the creatures had already crept deep into their soggy bed, away from the light.
My husband is a man with a gift for simplicity of logic and language.
“So,” he summarized, “You’ve paid a hundred dollars so that we can have worms in the basement eating our scraps.”
“Yes!” I said, “But don’t forget: They will gobble up the garbage. By next spring we’ll have wonderful, rich loamy soil for the roses.”
“Okay,” he said, clearly enjoying himself. “So you’ve paid a hundred dollars so that in six months’ time we’ll have a bag of dirt.”
“Good dirt! Virtuous dirt!” I cried, but honestly, by that point I’m not sure he could hear me over the sound of his own laughter.
Examiner columnist Meghan Cox Gurdon is a former foreign correspondent and a regular contributor to the books pages of The Wall Street Journal. Her Examiner column appears on Thursdays.
