MacGougan at Large
[Notes on Other Substacks - 5] Interrupted for a Test of the Emergency Mulch Article Broadcast System
I had a column about Substack pricing schemes lined up for today, but decided at the last minute that it wasn’t up to my usual riveting standards. In its place, I’m substituting a piece about mulch I posted recently on LinkedIN for the benefit of my former work colleagues. If you’re one of my former work colleagues, sorry for the repetition. We’ll get back on track Friday with a Substack song.
Something to Mulch On
A word of warning to my still-working friends: Yes, being retired is nice, but it makes you a sitting duck for projects that weren’t a good use of your previously-valuable time. I say this as someone who has just spent a week shoveling mulch.
When I was gainfully employed, my wife and I would hire a landscaping company to spread mulch around our garden areas. This was a very impressive operation to watch. They had pneumatic hoses that could deliver hot or cold running mulch to anywhere on our property.
This year, the big question was whether we would once again hire the job out or to look upon my retirement as providing just the sort of unskilled labor that might save us a few dollars. In retrospect, I needed a better answer to the question: “What were you planning to do that’s more important than shoveling mulch?”
It’s possible to purchase mulch in bags, but that’s sort of like buying individually-wrapped potato chips. The product to packaging ratio is not good. When you buy mulch in bulk, it’s measured in yards, which is pretty confusing. Whose yard? I have a front yard and a back yard. Does that mean I should order two yards of mulch?
My wife calculated the number of yards we should order using the tried-and-true “N Minus One” calculation, where N is the number of yards that her retirement-age husband can shovel before having a heart attack. Apparently my heart is pretty strong, because we ordered 15 yards of mulch. A big truck then came and delivered Mark MacGougan’s Mulch Mountain. For a time, it was known to local climbers as M-4. Before I got to work shoveling, it briefly made the USGS maps as the highest point in Connecticut.
Many people claim to love gardening, but nobody loves shoveling mulch. You’ll hear “I love the feeling of dirt on my hands!” but you’ll never hear “I love the feeling of lots of little toothpicks in my socks!”
Shoveling mulch requires some degree of cunning and strategy. The consistency of a pile will vary considerably from the outer few inches to the inner core. The shoveler is always looking for seams of loose mulch that will yield satisfyingly large shovelfuls. When on a good run, the successful shoveler can feel the sort of smug satisfaction that can only be earned when a simple homo sapien with no formal education beyond an undergraduate bachelor of arts is able to temporarily outwit a pile of Flammable Dirt.
The pile has been shrinking steadily. Soon, its only remnant will be a brown shadow on our driveway. I suspect the shadow will be permanent - unlike the mulch, which my wife tells me will need to redone in two years.
Two years? I get to wait longer between colonoscopies.
I’m not a cousin and I’m loving your column.
As a former work colleague (I’ll be honest, “former work colleague” sounds pretty clinical coming from someone we used to refer to as “Magoo”), I was going to chide you on making me sit through another mulch lecture. But then I again read the phrase “sort of like buying individually wrapped potato chips” and I remembered why I was here in the first place - the cleverness* of your writing (some would call it goofiness).
Incidentally, as a relatively new subscriber I haven’t yet been able to get to all the MacGougan at Large entrees. I’m hoping that there aren’t a lot of mulch-related topics.
*this in no way suggests that I’ll be upgrading to paid status, at least for now and, if I’m honest, for the foreseeable future.