I was enjoying the local newspaper, lit by the sunlight coming through my living room window when a loud rumble disrupted my analysis of my very troubling horoscope and things became very dark.

It wasn’t a storm. The rolling thunder was produced by giant pickup truck towing a trailer overloaded with a mountain of mulch. It pulled up to the curb in front of my house and two skinny guys armed with pitchforks got out and mounted the mulch pile and proceeded, for the next four hours, to spread the stuff around my neighbor’s property.

They mulched the borders around the house, they mulched the garden that hasn’t yet emerged from its winter’s nap. They mulched in mounds and piles and paths. By the time they were done the skinny guys looked as thin as the handles on their pitchforks.

Then another truck arrived to another house in our subdivision and another and another for several days. They were all loaded with mulch and crews of guys with shovels and rakes and pitchforks and cups of steaming Tim Horton’s coffee. They’d toss the mulch around every tree so high the maples and oaks looked like they were wearing mulchy mini skirts.

I get mulch is chemical-free and useful to retain moisture and retard weed growth but there’s so much of it applied it would take a 100 year flood to get the water down to the roots where it would do some good.

We moved to this sub about four years ago and it didn’t take long to catch on to the fact the folks here are apparently locked in a seasonal mulch death match. One resident will kick it all off with a fairly modest mulch application, perhaps even doing it themselves with bags of it from the local garden store. Touche’!

It doesn’t take long before another resident sees this and makes a quick call to a landscape company ordering a load of mulch for their yard that will make the do-it-yourselfer look like a pathetic mulch neophyte.

Then it all cascades into an all-out mulch brawl where homeowners put in their orders for even more mulch and before long there’s a convoy of mulch mobiles clogging up our streets and curbs and armies of mulch men are dispatched to pile it higher, higher, higher! Wider, wider, wider! Hell, pile it so high the damn mulch touches the lowest limbs!

Now I must admit, I do freshen the mulch around my trees and garden..a little! Usually 6 bags does it. I’m done dumping and spreading it in less than an hour and it looks pretty fresh for the season. Truth is, I could grab a wheelbarrow and skim off the first three feet of mulch from my neighbor’s yard and they’d never know it was gone..or maybe they would. Maybe they’re so obsessive they’re mulch measurers!

All I know is the obsession my neighbors seem to have for heaps of shredded bark and wood to the point of shelling out untold dollars for hundreds of cubic yards to cover their yards has me thinking they should rename our sub Mulch Gulch.

And, well, not to be rude, but considering the shape some of these folks are in, perhaps they’re already retaining too much water.