Last week’s submission left three fictitious youngsters in the hayloft of Uncle Ex Newman’s barn as they laid out of school—Clark Mosely, his older brother Hen, and their still older cousin Jay Harvey Tatum. We’ll join them in their misadventures once again soon, but inspiration has taken me on another path for this week.

When I married my wife and she moved to Maynardville with me, she had these wonderful notions of planting all these wonderful flowerbeds. Flowerbeds are indeed beautiful to look at if they are maintained. I am not by nature one who likes to spend hours working in flowers. I’d prefer to read. I strongly advised her not to plant all these flowerbeds. I told her, and those of you who know me well can readily agree, that I am not bent toward manual labor. I predicted that she either wouldn’t or couldn’t maintain these proposed flowerbeds, and I had no interest in them. However, she followed her own star and planted them.

The flowerbed full of beautiful purple irises that she planted on the spot where we cut down a large silver maple was the first to fall victim a few years to weeds, to the point that it was impossible to free the thickly planted irises from the weeds. The weeds were removed with the push lawn mower, which not only got rid of the weeds but the entire bed of irises. It is now completely gone.

A few years ago I encountered a young man at church who was seemingly trying to get his life in order. He always was in need of money, and was not ashamed to ask for it. I am a believer that if you give a man a fish that he will eat it and hunger again, but if you provide him opportunity to earn his bread by the sweat of his brow that it will be more meaningful. In other words, I did not want to enable his lack of work but give him opportunity to earn what he needed while helping a fellow man--me. I had a need, and he had a need, and it seemed each could help the other. I arranged to have him help me mulch my flowerbeds.

In many ways, it turned out to cost me more than it provided him. He had no transportation, so I had to go get him every time he worked and then drive him back home, a round trip of no less than fifty miles. I had to work with him to ensure he stayed on task. He did at least teach me one valuable, inexpensive thing about mulching flowerbeds—before mulching, pull the larger, bulkier weeds, then place newspaper over those which remain, then cover the paper with mulch. He learned this from his grandmother, a wonderful person, who was an avid flower gardener in her younger days. This will suffocate the weeds but still allow moisture to seep through for the plants and flowers which remain uncovered at their bases.

The trick to doing this is to be sure not to place the paper so thickly that water can’t penetrate or so thinly that water and wet mulch puncture the paper and allow weeds to poke through. Also, the paper has to overlap to prevent areas of weeds still being able to poke through.

This was so simple that I was dubious at first, but I tried this with great success around the foundation of the building in my back yard that houses my home library. I have repeated this process once annually for the past several years. Some weeds still appear, sometimes taking root in the mulch itself, but it takes minimal care to pull these small weeds and maintain a relatively weed-free bed.

My wife is more the type who leaned toward putting down either plastic (hard to penetrate when you wish to seed a new flower) or what I call “felt flowerbed fabric” (I’ve never found it to be weed preventative). I convinced her to try my “newspaper trick”. We tried it on another flowerbed that was planted where another yard tree but the dust. The paper was rather effective in keeping down weeds, so therefore we tried it at the flowerbed at the end of the driveway. Again, a relative success, though even flowers when not maintained as they should be must occasionally be cut down to spring forth again into more abundant life the following season.

This past Saturday found me working in my yard. It was May 2, 2020, the first day I found it warm enough to mow the lawn in my shorts without a shirt. Mowing is the closest thing that I do on a regular basis that can be equated with physical work. I enjoyed the sun, and just as I do every year, I did sunburn a little—probably enough to be dangerous, but not enough to hurt very much or last for long.

It was a perfectly sunshiny day, one of those days that makes me glad God has decided to let me stay on earth a little longer. Normally I mow the majority of my lawn with a riding lawnmower, then trim under the trees and around the house and shrubbery with my push mower.

But this particular Saturday found me helping my wife mulch her front flowerbed, the biggest one right next to the living room, and also the one that everyone sees if they pull into my driveway. Last fall, I mowed this flowerbed to the ground with the push mower, as the weeds had overtaken it to the point that it was beyond hope.
And what I anticipated happened. The flowers came back, as I did not disturb their roots. Unfortunately, the weeds also came back, but my wife and I agreed that if she would pull the weeds and leave the flowers she wanted to keep that I would help her mulch the bed.

So after riding the mower for a couple of hours, there I stood on the bed of the truck, shoveling mulch into a wheelbarrow. I jumped down between each filling of the barrow to spread the newspaper, then helped the wife put the mulch at the critical junction points to keep the paper from blowing away until a thicker layer of mulch could be laid. It does not take the most inexperienced worker to learn that newspaper cannot be easily spread outside on a windy day, and even the slightest breeze will send it sailing to the neighbor’s yard.

I suppose the wife and I worked above two hours. We worked until the light faded, and we were at least 95 per cent done. Of course, as little as my hands touch a shovel I was getting weary in my well doing by the time darkness relieved me of the day’s burden. I was already feeling the strain on muscles that had been unused since my last treadmilll experience at the doctor’s office.

The sunset that day was beautiful—that perfect shade of orange that only Tennessee sunsets seem to have. There was something about that sunset and me shoveling all that mulch that reminded me of the movie Titanic. There is a brief scene that shows the men who shoveled coal into the boilers that provided steam to the ship’s boilers to power the motor. So much coal was required that several men in shifts had to shovel coal continuously to keep the motors running and all the ship’s amenities functioning.

I thought how much more fortunate I was than they. The brilliance of the sunset reminded me to the hot fires in the Titanic’s boilers and how those men must have sweated and suffered. I thought of those sent to prison who worked in chain gangs busting rocks. I thought of all those in the dark, cold, damp underground who mined the coal that kept me warm during my youthful winter days at home and school. I remembered an episode of Little House on the Prairie in which Charles Ingalls had to travel a distance from home during a rough time to help drill holes in rock with a sledge hammer and anvil for dynamiting rock.

Social isolation prevails and COVID-19 is a threat, but life is still good for me, and I hope for you as well, Dear Reader. In so many ways it could be much worse.
I leave you with another blurb from my world of email:

He got a job at a bakery because he kneaded dough.