The soil was rich with rotted leaves and the leavings of a rabbit family that had nested under the vines last summer before my dog, Wolfie, discovered them.
Refining cellulose, however, means using corn husks instead of corn kernels, bagasse instead of cane sugar, and agricultural and industrial waste of all kinds — things like wood chips, the leavings of paper mills and fallen leaves from the backyard.
No one had much money, but Mr. Bernstein's father, an angry, embittered man, drank most of his paycheck away, leaving his wife to beg for the leavings, which were never enough to support two girls and three boys.
ON A patch of land between the American River and a bike path on one side and the pylons of a power company on the other, about a half-hour's walk from California's state capitol in Sacramento, men in orange suits have been clearing out the tarps, tents, mattresses, used needles and the other leavings of some 150 homeless people.
The current is not strong, but the rocks are slimy with hippo leavings.
"It seemed to me as if Andy Warhol's notion of 15 minutes of fame had gone well past human reason into something else where being close to the leavings of a famous star was where late 20th century art actually found it's meaning," says O'Hagan.
Empty rooms aren't without their messages, of course, and in quite a lot of museums and artistic shrines they aren't empty anyway – frequently stuffed with the bric-a-brac and leavings of the dead artist, which is often arranged in as close an approximation to naturalism as curatorial nervousness will allow.
Remoras feed on the leavings of their hosts' meals or, in some instances, act as cleaners by eating the external parasites of their transporters.
The house was strewn with the leavings of a tag sale earlier in the week: twentieth-century obsolescence on the block — a silver tea service in the corner of an empty living room; cameras and sunglasses on the dining-room table; old skis, golf clubs, and wooden tennis racquets in the basement.
"The leavings of a life," as D. H. Lawrence might say.
The bones near the top were the leavings of modern humans, who occupied La Ferrassie once the Neanderthals were gone.
