As many of you know, Ecclesiastes is one of the Bible’s wisdom books, a little morsel I planned to mention at just the right moment.
Because with a blue sky, cottony Simpson’s clouds floating overhead and temperatures entering the 60s, the ancient book seemed to offer a perfect defense for a man with a rare day off in the middle of the week and loafing on his mind.
True, it would have been nice had Shakespeare come through with some kind of get-out-of-yard-work-free pass in iambic pentameter.
But I had no need of the Bard. I had the Good Book and a sound strategy.
“Listen to this honey,” I imagined myself shouting up the stairs while thumbing through the thin pages of the Old Testament.
“To everything, there is a season ... A time to be born ...
A time to die ... A time to plant ... A time to uproot the plant ...
“I’ve been through the whole section, and — you know, this really surprises me — but there’s no Biblical mention of a time to mulch.”
“Just to be fair,” I just managed to say without swallowing my tongue, “let me check the creation story.”
After waiting for a proper amount of time to pass while watching ESPN, I continued.
“No, nothing here, either. I thought I had remembered from my Sunday school days about God mulching on the sixth day. (I was now wearing rubber shoes in the event of a lightning strike.) But no go.”
Alas, fair readers, I must confess that my well rehearsed lines never were spoken.
Even as I was rotating the wheels on my inline skates — brushing the grit off with an old toothbrush, adding a drop of oil to each so I could glide down the trail like a toothless hockey player on ice — things started falling apart.
A check of the forecast informed me the tarot card readers at the National Weather Service were calling for rain on the weekend. That meant no mulching then.
Soon thereafter, another person in my household spotted a sale on mulch in the newspaper and suggested “we” at least check it out.
What can I say? It sounded reasonable at the time.
Finally, when I put the first five bags in the back of the van, and not a one seemed was fermenting with mold, I caved like a spelunker.
As my mind scanned back through the wisdom books again, it kept landing on Job — save that, in my mind, the “o” sounded like lob rather than lobe.
Soon I could hear Roger McGuinn of the Byrds singing: “A time to mulch ... I swear it’s not too late.”
Contact this reporter at (937) 328-0368 or tstafford@coxohio.com.
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