House of Trash

 Some people dream of mansions or palaces, villas by the sea or castles on hills or cabins in the woods; my dream house is made of trash.

When did I become interested in cob? I can't even remember. The nearest I can pinpoint it is two years ago, when I first decided I wanted to be a farmer. Or, no–that was only a year ago that I stood in the big, well-organized used bookstore and flipped through The Hand-Sculpted House, amazed at my luck in having found it there, waiting for me on a shelf in a city 300 miles from my own. A year, or two–I've known I want to build a house of trash for a substantial unit of time now.

Cob is a mixture of clay, sand, straw, and water, and people have been building houses out of it for hundreds–perhaps even thousands–of years. And they have stood that long, health-giving and shelter-giving, monuments of the past that we have given up making in favor of husks made out of wood and paper, fiberglass and plastic. The homes we make from the forests we rape are full of chemicals and particles that ruin–or at least do not promote–our health or happiness.

Cob's impact is gentle, positive, even. The people who build and live in cob houses report feeling happier, less stressed, more peaceful and grounded.

But a house of cob is hardly a house of trash, is it?

It is if you bury trash in the walls.

I regularly and hungrily search for images and videos of cob houses online. A while ago I watched a cob house tour on YouTube where the owner talked about burying garbage in the walls as she built. Because cob walls are solid, not hollow like the walls of conventional homes, you can do this. You can bury trash in the walls, swallow up something harmful and ugly in something beautiful and life-supporting.

* * *

I collect jars. Jam jars, peanut butter jars, pickle jars, spice jars. Maybe the urge to collect them when my family and I have emptied them of their former contents is the same urge that prompts me to ask for my dad's uneaten sweet potato skins; I hate seeing things wasted. (We would recycle the jars and compost the sweet potato skins if I didn't use them, but still.)

Only a month or two ago did the ideas of a cob house with garbage in the walls and the collection of unused jars slowly accumulating in my closet collide. I now have so many jars that I can't possibly use them all, but I don't want to stop collecting them. And it struck me: Zero-wasters sometimes collect their plastic trash in a jar. Why can't I do the same, picking up trash from sidewalks and roadsides, stuffing them into my jars, and then bury those jars of garbage in cob walls? It would be a laugh at industry, at consumer culture–albeit a very small laugh, no more than a chuckle, really. To surround useless garbage with the material of my shelter, transform a problem into something beautiful.

It may not be fancy. It may not be a standard conception of what a dream home looks like. But I can think of nowhere I'd rather live than my house of trash.