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Mulch, in its many forms, seems to follow me around. It followed me on a visit to Honey's sister Lucky Lindy and her family at their newly built homes in Green Cove Springs, Fla.
"I need to get some black mulch for the space between my sidewalk and the house," Lindy mentioned.
That was all I needed to set in motion a chain of events which would result in her spending $700 and me commanding a troop of grandsons and their cousins in a backbreaking work project performed in Florida heat.
I had already fixed her front door and a plant stand and two or three other things. Two days on vacation and I was in severe work withdrawal.
First I talked her out of using black mulch on my unproven suspicion that it would stain her pretty new concrete. Plus, all wood mulch fades and she would constantly need to add more.
"You should use undyed natural mulch," I preached. "By the way, did the contractor seal your concrete?"
"No" was the answer so it was off to Home Depot to spend a hundred dollars on concrete sealer and a sprayer to apply it to the sidewalk, patio, porch, and parking pad. I spent a morning moving patio furniture and potted plants, washing and scrubbing sand and tire tracks off the parking platform, and waiting for the concrete to dry sufficiently to apply the sealant, which in Florida is a minute and a half.
Then we went shopping for mulch.
With a new house built, painted and decorated on a theme of black-and white everything, and I mean everything, Lindy was not pleased with the natural brown cypress mulch the salesman at Mulch, Mulch and More Mulch showed us.
"Does it attract insects?" she asked.
"You're in Florida," said the salesman.
We walked among displays of various rock mulch, which would be "permanent" and less inviting to bugs. Lindy's daughter had mulched around her black-and-white house with black lava rock, which is abundant in Florida because of the many volcanoes there, like Mount Daytona Beach.
"Look at that. That's pretty," my wife said, pointing at a display of egg-sized chunks of mottled black and white granite. It was even cheaper than lava rock, "cheap" in this context meaning about the same cost per pound as prime rib.
And so it came to pass that later the same day, a dump truck loaded with two cubic yards of "Salt and Pepper" granite mulch backed up to Lindy's house and dumped it on a sheet of plastic laid over the sand of her future yard. Have you ever tried to shovel jagged rock chunks off plastic? Of course you haven't, it can't be done, and our grandsons and their cousins can now testify to that. Our crew of 10 men and boys simply oozing testosterone had to rake the rocks onto the shovels, which we all did joyfully enough while I sang Sam Cooke's "Chain Gang," and "Sixteen Tons" by Tennessee Ernie Ford, reinforcing the notion in Honey's family that Uncle Fred is a little touched in the head.
The women labored like work gang convicts too, spreading the rock mulch in the four-by-50-foot space on top of the materials we had laid down first: ant killer, weed barrier and a piece of hardware cloth protecting a drainpipe. (The garden department employee at Home Depot had never heard of "hardware cloth." I enjoyed authoritatively saying "hardware cloth" many times.)
The word "mulch" comes from an ancient Germanic word meaning soft or decayed. Lucky Lindy's finished granite mulch bed is the exact opposite of those meanings, but it looks pretty, suits the house, and is as permanent as anything in Florida can be.
A project well done, we took ibuprofen and slept well that night.
(Fred Miller's third book of stories, "A Dead Carp on Shadyside Ave." is $10 and available locally at Calcutta Giant Eagle, Pottery City Antique Mall, Museum of Ceramics, Frank's Pastries, Davis Bros. pharmacies, and the Old Ft. Steuben gift shop.)