To her credit, she is quite the agreeable soul. She contentedly eats leftovers, helps in the garden, and never complains.

In fact, she has yet to utter a single word. This is extremely fortunate because if the composter we purchased from the city of Raleigh suddenly started talking, we'd truly start to wonder about ourselves.

After we brought the composter home, I set it up beside the old shed. I write the "old shed" as opposed to the new shed, where the lawn mower lives. By the all rights the old shed should have capitulated to Hurricane Fran more than a decade ago. In its sheer persistence, it retains a rustic charm and earns its keep as a house for flower pots, tomato cages, and bird seed. One outside wall serves as a terminus for the wash lines, and beside it is a patch of ivy grown gracefully wild.

The Madame was given her aristocratic moniker as we were sitting on the back porch. I was contemplatively sipping a coffee, and my mother was cross-stitching. I leaned back and was studying the contraption I had secured to the ground only a few hours before.

"We should name the composter," I suggested.

My mother paused, needle and thread poised midair, and studied me, one eyebrow slightly raised.

"It would be more fun than calling it the compost heap," I replied.

"True," she acknowledged, finishing that stitch and then another.

Thus the Madame received her title, so named as the black barrel resembles the flowing and formal skirt that a Victorian lady of means may have worn as she sat in her parlor.

When her scrap pail is full, she receives her repast. She often dines on potato peels, apple cores, spent tea bags, eggshells and used coffee grounds. Other times her fare includes cabbage and lettuce leaves, carrot scrapings, onion skins, and the occasional melon rind.

When I remove the lid from the barrel and tiny flies are swirling, it is past time to aerate the mixture; the Madame has grown restless. I don't just put in old newspaper; I bring her reading material.

I remember well the first time I used the compost the Madame produced. It was October, and I had planted chrysanthemums and tulip bulbs.

I lifted the door at the base of the barrel, and there before me was indeed a minuscule composite of natural foods enjoyed throughout the summer. In autumn's afternoon light, there glistened the remaining nutrients from our appropriate peelings and discards. Back into the soil these gleanings would go, bits that were once vegetables after first being seedlings that fought their way to the surface.

I have learned to not be surprised if the particles don't break down as quickly as I expect. After working hard to achieve the perfect conditions, sometimes all that remains is to leave it to the elements and wait.

The compost, as it evolves, is both raw and dormant. I've felt this way myself, shaken up, in transition, and yet somehow in the same place.

Unlike me, the compost doesn't have to tell itself to be patient, to accept these unsettled moments as inherently valuable ones.

The compost simply takes everything within it, rearranges it, and pares it down until that which remains is precisely what is necessary for further growth and new beginnings. It just travels its journey, deriving the optimum good from what it is given.

When I consider it that way, the Madame, even in her silence, has spoken volumes.