Alexandra Paskhaver: Dirt, cheap

Alexandra Paskhaver: Dirt, cheap

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.…