Where's the (bleeping) mulch, Lebowski?

I was out of my element.

Photo by Paul Green on Unsplash

I’m a journalist at heart, and we are taught to not “bury the lede” of our stories.

Our family has big news: We bought a new house in the Twin Cities and we will be moving into it soon.

Buying a new house is the (mostly) fun part. We got to bring our kids to showings and open houses, where they imagined which bedroom might be theirs. My wife and I got to envision what we might do with more space.

Moving is bittersweet because we have loved our house and our neighborhood. The kids are nervous and excited — new house, new neighborhood, new school. Maybe once we move I will have a better chance to articulate how we arrived at the decision, but the easiest answer is that it just felt like the time was right.

For now, though, my bandwidth is a little low. Because the not-so-fun part is that we are also in the process of getting ready to sell our house.

It’s a great house, but it also has more than 11 years and three kids worth of accumulated stuff. Nothing makes you question everything you have obtained in a decade-plus quite like having to pack it up, throw it away or donate it on a tight timeline.

My wife and I have tried to divide up the getting the house ready tasks according to our relative strengths. I’m dealing with the yard, the basement and the garage, plus a lot of carrying of bins. So many bins. She is doing the inside decluttering and a lot of the cleaning.

We have had invaluable help over the last 10 days or so as we prepare to list our house, and (hopefully) the finish line is in sight. For now, though, we are still moving through the checklist.

And I am becoming intimately familiar with mulch — a journey with humble and (in retrospect) humorous beginnings.

I’ve bought mulch before. Let’s get that straight. But usually I buy it at the hardware store about eight blocks from our house, and it’s just sitting on pallets in the parking lot.

This time, I had a giant list of things to buy at a larger home improvement store (which one is irrelevant, but it is a place where you can save big money). Why not buy mulch while I was there?

The system seemed amazing at first: They have a whole bunch of samples of the kinds of mulch with prices per bag. You take a slip of paper to the register corresponding to the kind you want, tell them how many bags you want, and pay for it there without having to lug it all throughout the store.

So I paid for everything, and I was told by the checkout person that I would scan the bar code I was given in order to enter the vast area where the mulch is kept. Just stay to the left, she said, toward the garden center.

Sounds easy, right?

But there was nowhere to park by the garden center. Also there was no mulch.

So I drove over to the area that said “deliveries,” parked in a spot and called the number. “Hi,” I said. “Is this where I get my mulch?”

The guy on the other end of the line was a little perplexed. He told me I needed to go to the garden center. That didn’t seem too helpful based on my previous experience, so I drove out of the restricted area, parked and walked back into the store to the customer service desk.

I was going to get to the bottom of this. The woman in customer service told me to go back where I was, but that I wanted to go into the warehouse. Ah, now we were getting somewhere.

I got back in my car, scanned the bar code again, and resumed my hunt. I drove into what looked like a warehouse area, but that is not where the mulch is kept. Of course not. That’s an area that looks more like a pickup area for contractors.

At this point, I had already asked three people where I was going. I was behind on getting started on the yard project. I was somewhere between frustrated and amused that this was somehow so complicated.

It was a nice day and my window was rolled down, and for some reason as I was driving out of the warehouse I shouted, “Where’s the (bleeping) mulch, Lebowski?”

As I emerged from the warehouse, a guy who — I am not kidding — looked a little bit like The Dude made eye contact with me. I slowed down.

“I heard you might be looking for mulch,” he said.

He insisted that I really did need to go into the garden center. But there’s nowhere to drive, I insisted.

Just drive down one of the long rows outside, he said.

I was so far out of my element that I just nodded and said I would give it a try. I parked next to a bunch of giant pots, in a place clearly meant for browsing, and still did not see any mulch.

Over by the flowers, I flagged down worker No. 5, a young guy who turned out to be the hero of the story. He looked at the kind of mulch I wanted.

Get back in your car, he said. Go back out the way you came. Go toward the warehouse again, but this time stay to the right. There will be a long ramp that says do not enter. Do not go up that ramp. Stay to the left. Keep going. And you will find the mulch.

These directions were so specific that I actually had hope. I did as he said, and suddenly I could see pallets of the small wood chip goodness in the distance.

I kept going until I found the kind I had bought. There was a worker there, and he asked how many bags.

“Twenty,” I said.

He looked at my car, wondering if there was really room in there for 20 bags of mulch. Suddenly I was wondering the same thing.

But he helped me load it in. We crammed 15 bags in the trunk and another five bags in the front seat.

“Good thing I didn’t ask for 25,” I said with a laugh.

He did not laugh.

Triumphantly, I returned to the guard station, where they inspected my precious cargo to make sure I wasn’t trying sneak out any extra mulch.

I have had to return two more times to buy more mulch, of course, because as someone who is now steeped in mulch culture I know that you always end up needing more than you think you do.

Trying to keep up with all this house prep in addition to still working and chasing around our kids is exhausting, and it has left me punchy enough that on multiple occasions while spreading the mulch in various areas I have muttered to myself, “Mulch much?”

But it is all almost worth it when I roll up to the huge store and know exactly where I am going every step of the way.

Just in time to move to a new neighborhood and start all over again.