When my neighbor told me he could transform garbage into gold, I laughed.

My neighbor is no alchemist. He didn’t even pass high school chemistry. The idea that he could make hamburger scraps into precious metals was hilarious, even to a seasoned jokester like myself.

“Watch,” he told me (this is a weighty word for the doubters among us). He led me to a tarp covering something in his backyard.

There didn’t seem to be gold bricks beneath the tarp. It looked soft and lumpy. And there was a distinctly manure-like smell coming from it.

I must say I wasn’t impressed. I wasn’t impressed. There, I said it.

As we approached, I felt wisps of heat flit along my legs. “Perhaps it’s a gold forge,” I thought to myself, though this was admittedly one of the dumber thoughts I thought that day.

With a great heave, my neighbor threw off the tarp. “Eugh!” I said.

“Gold!” he said.

“Eugh!” I repeated. I wanted to make sure he got my point. The dirt I was looking at surely deserved no other word.

My neighbor plunged a hand into the dark soil beneath the tarp. He let it sift through his fingers and grinned at me.

All I could think about was if I did that, I would ruin my manicure forever. My manicure was already chipped, but it would be absolutely decimated by that dirt.

“This miracle compost will make your flowers bloom longer and more brightly,” he told me.

I didn’t have the heart to tell him that my garden consisted mainly of plastic flowers, but I nodded along, still unconvinced.

His dirt looked like garbage. Or maybe it’s the other way around.

It certainly didn’t look like gold. But the enthusiastic manner in which my neighbor waved his arms and the way he raved about his compost started to win me over.

He offered me a jar of dirt for free. I took it. And I brought it home to my one living plant: a Japanese peace lily on the ledge inside my living room window.

The peace lily had seen better days. In fact, as soon as I had become its primary caretaker instead of my mom, it had steadily refused to flower.

So I dumped some compost around its roots, watered it, and waited.

Within a week, the change was miraculous. The peace lily’s leaves shone. It perked up. And it burst into small white flowers. It looked almost as good—no, better—than any of its plastic counterparts.

I rushed to my neighbor for more miraculous compost. But this time, he had a sly smile on his face.

“This stuff is worth its weight in gold!” I cried, and extended my jar for more. But my neighbor shook his head and said, “Give me $20 for it.”

So I paid $20 for what was essentially rotted food pulp. And it was worth every penny.

Now I know what my neighbor meant when he said compost was gold.

Copyright 2026 Alexandra Paskhaver, distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate. Alexandra Paskhaver is a software engineer and writer. Both jobs require knowing where to stick semicolons, but she’s never quite; figured; it; out. For more information, check out her website at https://apaskhaver.github.io.