Dr. Leon ‘Hoof’ Sourwood would be best described as a renaissance man of sorts. Aside from being the town doctor (or at least the only licensed one) he was always tinkering with a million other projects, which could vary anywhere from animal husbandry to ancient eastern pottery techniques. Dr. Sourwood had a nice flock of yard chickens that followed him on his daily walks around his property which bordered the cemetery to one side and the railroad tracks to the other. He would gather the eggs they made and eat them with pleasure every morning as he roasted his own coffee beans. Other than eating egg meat, he was a devout vegetarian and gardener and grew most of his own produce in the garden in his backyard. “The good Lord looks on my garden kindly. I got all that run off coming from the cemetery and the chickens...don’t know if it’s embalming fluid or chicken poop but one of them sure does make the okras grow big.”
Dr. Sourwood was a spiritual man but wasn’t affiliated with any of the churches in town. “It’s bad for business to take sides.” He spent many hours in his garden, chickens at his side, watching, philosophizing, and contemplating the miracle of life, death, space, and the will of nature. He decided he would let his garden decide for itself what it wanted to grow. To do this, every spring he would till up his garden by hand, with a plow he built himself. He would then go to the Julep Community Compost Pit and transfer everything from the previous year to his garden.
The Julep Community Compost Pit was not any ordinary pile of rotten vegetables. Dr. Sourwood, being the good man he was, had created the program for the townsfolk in order to teach them the values of sustainable living, but also so he could get an idea of what his patients were eating...which seemed to be a large amount of macaroni and cheese. Anyone could throw whatever they wanted in the pit - didn’t matter how gross it was, as long as it was all compostable. If someone was not able bodied Dr. Sourwood would come by on his vintage bicycle once a week, chickens in tow, and pick up the compost for them.
After he spread the annual contents of the pit on his garden he would water it, sit in his chair, and wait. The smell was atrocious so for the first few weeks of spring he had a fire pit going and made organic pottery while he watched the garden. Inevitably some of the seeds from the rotten vegetables had survived the compost process and would start to take root as the macaroni and other rubbish provided nutrients and encouraged growth.
Some years the garden provided an endless bounty of varied fruits and vegetables. Others not so much...“One year all I got was sweet corn so I guess someone in town was trying to make shine. Another year I only got melons and okras...that was a bit tough on the ol’ gastrointestinal tract...bathroom looked like a styrofoam cooler exploded in there.”
Most of the time the bounty of the garden exceed what the doctor’s family and chickens could eat and so he would carefully can it and donate to his patients in artisan handcrafted jars he made. The people would take it and smile. They would put some of it on their plate near their macaroni and cheese, eat part of it, and throw the rest in the compost. Thus completing the cycle of meditation, compost, and macaroni once again.