Free Mulch by Ann Ripley

moved in, he had started playing poker with the neighborhood men; he was developing bosom buddies faster than she was. As usual, her husband was right at home in a new place. Maybe that was because his family had moved many times when he was a child, while she spent her entire early life in the same house, with the same friends and neighbors.
    As for the job search, she’d made some progress, hadn’t she? She had borrowed an updated version of
What Color Is My Parachute?
from the library and answered a half dozen or more leads from friends and from the paper for writers and editors. So far she had had two interviews. Each time the job sounded so dull that she could hardly wait to get away. In both cases the offices had been modern, gray, electronically overburdened, and just not her kind of office at all. She would have to work on that.
    Summing it up, Louise could say everything had been going along fairly smoothly. There were little things not quite set to rights: the smell and the swamp in the yard. The smell was in a closet within a closet. Mr. Woodruff, on seeing it, dismissed it. “Y’c’n fix it yourself,” he assured her. “All these slab houses, from California on out cast, have no basements so they have dead air beneath them. Usually smells like a rat died.”
    It was a small linen closet with a long, thin door in its side wall. This allowed access to some pipes for the adjacent bathroom that ran from underneath the concrete slab the twelve feet up to the flat roof. When she had first opened this access door she recoiled backward, holding her nose against thestrong, moldy odor, and noted fleetingly before she closed the door that it would have made a good hiding place for her precious jewels, had she owned any.
    Bill thought the odor inconsequential and had it low on his list of household tasks. She, on the other hand, put it first.
    This smell was her enemy. It was the distillation of all the strangeness and the adjusting she had had to do in the past two months.
    “It sucks!” she muttered. “It’s got to go.” Noting only fleetingly that she had absorbed daughter Martha’s raw language, she went to the kitchen cabinet where Bill kept assorted tools and found a big roll of silver duct tape. According to him it was capable of holding the whole world together. Now she’d find out if he was right or not.
    She ripped off stubborn hunks of the stuff and sealed the little door on all sides. Then she crouched down and sniffed from bottom to top. She smiled: only a trace of odor left.
    One more small battle won. She got into her Wellingtons and rain jacket and went to the kitchen and fetched the colander filled with daily food scraps—vegetable peelings, coffee grounds, and eggshells—and went to the living room and slid the tall glass doors open. As she stood on the semicircular patio, raindrops pelted her face. She took deep breaths of cold air that hinted at the coming of winter.
    She took a spade from the toolshed and dug a careful, deep hole in the garden alongside the patio, avoiding the little patch of pale lavender autumn crocus,
Colchicum speciosum
, which she had tucked amidst the
Geranium sanguineum “Album.”
She found a spot and dug energetically, dumped in the contents of the colander, then carefully replaced the earth. It made her feelgood that every useful scrap and ort of food was going back to recirculate in the earth. Each time she buried garbage, she thought of her grandmother, who had buried her scraps in her sunny, old-fashioned garden, winter and summer. She mused sadly on the fate of that old lady, who after having lived, loved, and gardened for eighty-two years, was now confined to a wheelchair in a retirement home. Only her bones, and not her mind, had deteriorated.
    Thoughtfully, Louise returned her spade to its place in the toolshed, trying not to dwell on the realization that her grandmother was nearing her last days. Then she came back into the yard and turned her eyes toward