The worms live in our basement, in two large storage bins stacked on the floor amid the clutter. Eventually, when I’ve built out more shelves and cabinets, they’ll have their own oversize drawers I can easily slide out when it’s time to feed them. I’ll carve the word WORMS into the wood, knowing that when Caroline and I are dead, new owners will puzzle over what was meant by WORMS. I mean worms. Red wigglers; Eisenia fetida in the Latin. Not the big fat native earthworms thriving out in the garden. These are imported worms, European. They don’t burrow deep enough to survive the winters here. They need us to survive.
I bought them online, a Christmas gift for Caroline that first year in the house. I’d forgotten to update my mailing address, so most of her gifts went to strangers living in our old apartment. Fortunately, the shipper wouldn’t leave a sack of live invertebrates on a doorstep without my signature, and I was alerted that I could pick them up at a distribution center in Maspeth. Caroline couldn’t understand why I was so anxious and insistent that we go immediately to get the package. “We can go after Christmas, it’s fine” she said; “it’s not like it’s something that’s going to DIE. Is it?” I didn’t answer that. At 11pm on Christmas eve, we walked to Maspeth. The next day when Caroline unwrapped her new worms, we laughed until we cried. She’d thought perhaps it was a kitten.
That was five Christmases ago. Back then, they could all fit in the palm of my hand, a little pink and ochre mass, naked and terrified of the light. How they’ve grown and multiplied, these limbless intestines eating and shitting their way through our refuse. I prepared their bedding with shredded New York Times. There was a brief time when we thought we wanted the print edition delivered on weekends, but they piled up, largely untouched. Some unexplained error on the Times’ end kept the papers coming. For a year I tried unsuccessfully to stop the deliveries. It was comical, but infuriating and wasteful. Now our worms, and many future generations of our worms, will dine on old news.
Once, I almost killed them all when I fed them too much of something, I don’t remember what, that they didn’t like. It sat uneaten, becoming rotten and slimy until it exploded in mold and turned the whole bin anaerobic. They were drowning, suffocating. Now I keep a closer eye on their diet and am careful their bedding doesn’t get too wet. I microwave the eggshells to kill bacteria and salmonella, and pulverize them in the coffee grinder to a size they’ll eat. The produce that was priced at one dollar, because it was about to spoil, and then did spoil because we never got around to cooking it. I don’t shave often, but when I do, our worms will feast on the hair from my face. I collect Caroline’s teabags from half empty glasses when she’s set the mug down, forgotten where she put it, and then steeped another tea. Lots of tea. Our worms are subtly fragrant of jasmine, chamomile, thyme.
One fall, Marianna and Raymond gifted our worms their pumpkin once Halloween had passed. They ate it all, but not before hundreds of seedlings sprouted. Most I left to die in the darkness where they, too, were eaten. But some I planted in the yard, and one vine spread so vigorously that I trained it up the cherry tree, and a bright orange Gourd of Damocles grew eight feet above our heads. When I cut it down, we gifted it back to Marianna and Raymond. Our worms have birthed a new tradition of pumpkin exchange between us.
When Trey died, Teri gave me a bag of his ashes. “You’d be amazed,” she told me, “how much ash he made.” Trey would have laughed that he’s become worm food, and once Spring arrives he’ll push up daisies. And larkspurs, lupines, cosmos, and nasturtiums. The worm shit of our lives will nourish the fragrant sweet alyssums, lilac, carnations and agastache that welcome us home after the workday. And the heavy-feeding tomatoes, potatoes, rhubarb, and facing-heaven peppers. Caroline and I will tend these plants longingly until harvest time, when we’ll eat well, and return our scraps to the worms.
—About the Art—
I have taken generous handfuls of shredded newspapers and added them to a bucket of rain. After a day or two, the black ink no longer forms letters or words; they have dissipated. The paper fibers no longer cling to themselves- they have swollen and dissolved into coarse gray porridge. Strained and pressed onto a screen and allowed to dry, they reconstitute themselves as primitive sheets – digested versions of their former selves. I stain them variously: with the deep purple berries of poisonous poke weed, white sap of milkweed, bright yellow blood of celandine stems. I brush the sheet with a tincture of spent spices- of turmeric and ahi powder. Another sheet I darken with worm castings, deep ocher and vaguely musty as a forest floor. Into this I cut a sinewy form. Backed with a sheet stained reddish purple, this negative space is vaguely evocative of the sign of infinity, or more particularly, the form of a worm.
—About the Author & Artist—
David Lowe is a writer, researcher, artist, and gardener in Queens, NY. He holds an MFA in Painting from Pratt Institute, and was the editor of New York Public Library’s Photographers’ Identities Catalog (pic.nypl.org). He is a contributing member of Woodside Writers, a literary forum based in New York City. He has been published in the journals Five Minutes and The Woodside Review.
*For more holiday fun, check out “A Country Christmas” by David P. Stewart*