Crumble

Crumble taught the chemistry of the returning without a scrap of squeamishness.

"A living leaf is built from carbon, nitrogen, minerals — all borrowed," Crumble said. "When it falls, all of that is still there, just locked inside tough molecules the plant can't drink back up. So we decomposers — fungi and bacteria together — release enzymes, tiny chemical scissors, and we cut the big tough molecules into small simple ones. We take some of the energy for ourselves, that's our meal, and the rest — the nitrogen, the minerals — dissolves free into the soil where roots can drink it again." Crumble spread the crumbs. "That is why a forest doesn't drown in its own fallen leaves. Every autumn's leaves become next spring's growth. We are the hinge between the two."

The older students caught the subtext: an ending is only an ending if nobody does the work of handing it forward.

Crumble had once been ashamed of the work, and said so.

"When I was small, the fast bright creatures got all the praise — the ones who bloomed, the ones who flew," Crumble said. "And I lived in the dim damp under the log, doing the slow dissolving nobody watched. I thought my job was the lowly one." Crumble smiled at the soil. "Then one year the returning stopped in a little patch — the decomposers there had died off — and the leaves just piled and piled, and nothing new could root in the choked ground. Nothing grew because nothing had been given back. That was when I understood. The bloom everyone praises is only possible because someone, unthanked, returned last year's bloom to the earth."

A student asked, a little disgusted, why anyone should care about rot.

"Because it isn't rot the way you mean it — it's repair," Crumble said, unoffended. "Watch what it isn't, first. When decomposers can't reach something — a plastic bottle, say — it doesn't return. It just sits, an ending that never becomes a beginning, for a human lifetime and more. That is waste: matter locked out of the cycle. What I do is the opposite of waste. I keep matter moving — leaf to soil to root to leaf again, around and around, so the same handful of nitrogen can be a thousand leaves across a thousand years." Crumble let the soil sift through its fingers. "The world has almost no new matter arriving. It runs on returning what it already has. That's my job. It's the least wasteful job there is."