Mulch Ado about Nothing

This past weekend, I celebrated Mulch Day.

Mulch Day in our house is the one day a year when I roll up my sleeves and clean up the bed in front of our house.

And truth be told, as noted prior. I'm not a big fan of Mulch Day.

Maybe it's because the whole concept of mulch was foreign to me.

I came from a non-mulch home. Growing up, we never mulched anything. We mowed the lawn. We pulled crabgrass here and there. Maybe planted a bulb or two.

But nothing on the order of Mulch Day.

There really was no need. My childhood home had a similar bed out front, below the picture window that looked into the living room. But it had some kind of ground cover -- I want to say pachysandra, but I'm not sure -- that rendered mulch superfluous.

But our home now has no such eye candy. And Eileen comes from a family that was firmly devoted to mulch.

So each spring, I do a general cleanup of the bed and end it all with a coating of moist, black, shredded, smelly wood chips.

There's something from the Myth of Sissyphus about all this: I pull every weed. I spray those tiny ones that are emergent. I trim the bushes. And I lay the mulch.

And initially, it's all neat and tidy.

But generally, before July 4, the bed's a mess again. The weeds have shoved their way back into prominence; much of the mulch has disappeared (where does mulch go? Does it blow away? Is it removed by birds? Do squirrels eat it? I have 0 understanding of where $120 for 12 bags of mulch goes in a mere handful of weeks); and the bushes need a haircut once more.

It's a sweaty, muscle-aching, sunburny job.

I will say that it all looks so nice when I'm finished.

And I do enjoy that it seems to herald the firm arrival of spring.

But all things equal, if we're talking about "days" in May, this much is true:

I much prefer the leisure of Memorial Day to the work of Mulch Day.