Gumshoe farmer

Chris shows me his worm farm and assures me that he didn’t have his own worm farm until he was fifty-five, and that I’ve got time, which is the same thing many people tell me about marriage. It produces a lovely compost—the worm farm, I mean, not marriage—which he uses with his sitting-undisturbed-for-one-year regular compost, spreads over ground that he has dug only once for aeration (don’t want to disturb the microorganisms in the soil) and plants many of the vegetables that they eat and the apple pie of tonight.

It’s a far cry from his career as a detective in Peterborough, which he still dabbles in as a speaker across the world, since he pioneered digital ways of presenting information to a jury that takes them out of their seats and puts them out of their seats and in the crime scene. One can see the fingerprints on the trash bags, get a 360º view of the room. He busted one of the biggest murder investigations in this area, one we heard about long before we realized he and his wife, Pat, are avid members of our congregation and how we serve lunch club with Pat every other Tuesday. We watch earth in BlueRay and ooh and ah at the great white sharks leaping out of the water, reminding me how I never want to surf in Australia.