The Trommel
Earlier this summer, my son and I built a compost trommel out of PVC pipe, a few cut-up Home Depot buckets, and a design I found online.
To be clear, I did not invent the thing.
At several points during construction, it looked less like engineering and more like the beginning of a very questionable backyard experiment. My wife came outside at one point, looked at the pile of plastic and glue and improvised fittings, and gave me the kind of expression that manages to communicate both support and skepticism simultaneously.
Fair enough. I wasn’t entirely certain either.
I knew that sifting compost by hand took forever. Our family has done it before with screens, shovels, aching backs, and a cubic yard of compost that could easily stretch across multiple days. It was slow, repetitive, and exhausting. The trommel promised something different. It would have a rotating screen: compost goes in one side, fine material falls through, and larger unfinished pieces tumble out the end. Its noot sophisticated; that’s the whole point.
While I was building it, I miscut the main axle by about an inch. I’d misunderstood how the whole thing came together structurally, and the mistake was obvious the moment I tried to fit the piece.
My son watched the entire thing happen.
There’s a particular kind of silence children have when they realize an adult may have genuinely messed something up. Then came the commentary.
“Wow,” he said. “You really screwed that part up.”
Which was accurate.
I told him something like: this is what happens sometimes. You make mistakes. Then you figure out how to make it work anyway. We adjusted the fit, salvaged the part, and kept moving. Eventually, this ridiculous-looking machine started working, spectacularly well.
When a compost trommel runs correctly, it makes this incredible sound. The closest comparison I can find is gravel being poured continuously onto a hard surface. It is a rushing, tumbling mechanical rhythm. Suddenly, there it was: black crumbly compost flying through the screen in huge volumes. My son lit up immediately. He was genuinely excited, not the polite version kids produce when they’re trying to be encouraging. The machine was moving so fast I could barely keep up feeding material while he ran the trommel itself. In about ninety minutes, we processed what would normally have taken several days by hand.
The trommel wasn’t innovative. Compost-processing efficiency is not exactly a latent passion I’d been waiting to unlock and post to LinkedIn.
The older I get, the more I think modern professional life can quietly disconnect us from visible outcomes. Much of my work now lives inside systems, meetings, implementation plans, AI workflows, and abstract problem-solving. It is important work, certainly. Often, it is intellectual work. Sometimes it is even meaningful work. But it is increasingly possible to spend entire days operating several layers removed from tangible consequence. You move information around. You optimize processes. You discuss frameworks. You iterate digitally.
And then occasionally you build a strange machine out of cheap PVC pipe and scrap plastic, and reality answers you immediately.
Either the axle fits, or it doesn’t. Either the compost flows, or it jams. Either gravity works with you, or it doesn’t care about your intentions. There is something deeply clarifying about that kind of feedback.
I grew up with days working on a ranch. Ranch life constantly moves between physical labor and problem-solving. You repair things because they need repairing. You adapt because weather, equipment, and biology do not pause for ideal conditions. Then you leave that world and enter another one built mostly from abstraction and intellect. And I value that world too. I love ideas. I love technology. I work in systems that are often highly conceptual.
I sometimes wonder what we lose when too much of life becomes detached from physical consequence.
Because tangible work has a particular honesty to it. It doesn’t care about performance. It cares about engagement. The trommel didn’t need to look professional to function beautifully. It didn’t require elegance. It just required enough understanding of the underlying problem to let ordinary materials create momentum together.
Children need to see that. They don’t need polished expertise or adults performing competence like it comes naturally. They need to see recoverable mistakes. They need to watch people build imperfect things that wobble a little and still succeed. Capability is often far less glamorous than it appears from a distance. Sometimes it’s just persistence plus adjustment plus attention. Sometimes it’s cutting the axle wrong and figuring it out anyway.
The older I get, the less I trust sophistication as a proxy for wisdom. Some of the most meaningful systems in life are surprisingly ordinary once you see how they actually work. Thoughtfully arranged parts. Steady movement. Visible consequence.
If something here landed differently than you expected — I’m reachable by reply.