Whatever his breeding might be, Chico surely has some flavor of collie in his background, making him a working dog. His nature is to be by my side, helping me with whatever I have to do.

One of the things I do is edit a small local newspaper. Since it’s small, I often write stories as well. Last spring, I went to White Gates Farm to write a story about their compost making project. Of course, Chico went along to help. We started out down in the sand pit where plies of leaves, wood chips, and manure are carefully mixed and monitored until they decompose into fluffy, rich compost.

That’s Chico with compost maker, farmer, and entrepreneur, Hank Letarte. Behind them is a pile of finished compost, waiting to be sifted and bagged for sale. Hank is pointing at one of the rows of ‘still cooking’ compost.

The finished compost has sticks and stones in it, things that don’t add nutritive value to the product, will rip bags, and will annoy customers; so Hank designed and was having built a series of rotating, tube-shaped, sieves to do the job.

So we went up to the shop to take a look.

No matter how interesting something is, when a guy’s got an itch, a guy’s got an itch.

It’s always interesting to me how happy it makes Chico to tag along with me. Surely this is a remnant of the ancient bond formed when early humans and early canines hunted and gathered together.