My wife is a Mulch-aholic. I have gone to their meetings, and there is no cure. It’s an illness caused when your mother didn’t let you play in the dirt as a 4-year-old.
Each spring, Lowe’s brings in 2 tractor trailer loads of brown mulch – one for Nancy and one for all the other gardeners in Charlottesville and Albemarle County. Mulch-aholics ofte try to hide their sickness. Rather than ordering 100 bags and just binge-mulching, she has me go get 10 bags at a time, which is all the back of my Jeep will comfortably handle. But I make daily, sometimes twice daily trips to Lowe’s for Nancy’s mulch fix. The loaders in the parking lot know me by first name. The cashier has my credit card memorized.
“It’s not for me,” I explain.
“That’s what they all say, isn’t it Mr. Brewer?”
The problem with being the husband of a Mulch-aholic is that I am the one in charge of unloading the mulch and distributing the plethora of bags to their designated areas.
These mulch bags weigh about the same as three bowling balls, but unlike bowling balls, they don’t have little holes with which to carry them. There are no handles either. You are forced to pick them up in the middle of the bag, hold them between your legs and somehow waddle to the place they will be laid to rest.
After about 3 days of this vigorous endeavor, your body parts begin to complain.
“What’s with all these 50-pound bags,” say the groins and ACLs and hamstrings.
“The heaviest thing you carried all year was a case of Coors Light, and now you are moving enough mulch to fill the Grand Canyon? We protest!”
Stocks in both Lowe’s and Ibuprofen are going through the roof, but soon every square inch of all our flower beds will be well mulched. And when my wife is finished, she’ll mulch the mulch.
There is, however, one bright spot. If they have a Waddle Race in the next Olympics, I win hands down.