Spreading Thin

I have never been one for memorizing units of measure. Growing up away from the secure confines of he metric system I have learned to measure things with hands, inches, pounds, grasshopper knees, and the occasional elephant's eye. Understandably, such a confusing concotion of terminology leaves one ever questioning amounts.

So, when Linda informed me that she had arranged for "five yards" of mulch to be delivered I was, understandably, confused. What exactly was a yard? My first guess was that a yard of mulch would be the amount of mulch one would need to bury ones yard with mulch. Indeed, I was correct. And Linda ordered five of them.

So, at 7am, we found our driveway completely covered in mulch. Staring at the mountainous, smoking mass I could only envision a midnight visit from Babe, the Blue Ox:



Over the next several days we worked heroically to spread our five yards of mulch across our single, small yard. See that tree in the corner? Wouldn't it look better surrounded by 40 pounds of mulch? Terrific. What about those grasses over there? A 1-foot high donut of mulch would really separate them from the rest of the yard.

We decided to make a five foot wide garden along one side of our house, just to have a place to put yet more mulch. Beware! It is deep enough that one could lose small children in it. At the end of the day, though, the gardens looked good (photos coming) and the mulch was tamed. No neighborhood children went missing, and that by itself is a small blessing.

I want this story to have a moral (I think if our stories have no moral then they really are not very good stories at all). I suppose my moral for this story is that When the things we plan on turn out to be bigger than ourselves then, quite simply, we must learn to expand our plans. The tree with the mulch doughnut around it looks pretty sharp now. So do the grasses. The thick mulch bed on the side of the house really sets it off.

I'd like to think that every time life dumps five times more fertilizer on me than I think I can use that I will always be lucky enough to find ways to make it work for me. I'm sure half of it's luck which means, of course, that half of it isn't.

-Ed