The first half of this is a 100% true story. Then it goes off the rails, in a good way. : )
"Don't forget we need mulch," she called out from the kitchen.
I was headed in to town for a swim, there's a master's club and I go four or five times a week. They're fast -- I'm in the bottom third of the team. So, it would be easy enough to go by the mulch pile on the way home. The Boulder County Public Works Dept. runs a recycling center where people can drop off tree branches or take away mulch. You can drop off old paint or fill dirt or other stuff too, but you have to pay for that.
Maybe it was an early workout and I was at the center by 8:00am on that Sunday, or maybe it was late afternoon. I don't remember. Nobody there, total ghost town. Thet Mulch was kept in a big pile out in the back parking lot. A huge pile really, the size of a house, a two story one. The trick here was to put the tailgate down and back the pickup into the steepest flank of the pile. Then from higher up, you could just shovel the mulch down into the bed. I had a pitchfork I think, but the picture I took just shows a regular short shovel so maybe I was using that one instead.
Anyway, I had clean clothes on, notwithstanding the hot day, 'cause I was fresh from the pool. So now I would get really sweaty and worse, covered with powdered tree dust and dirt, which after all is what mulch IS. It wasn't gross by any means, but definitely filthy, and it would get all over the inside of the truck too.
That's what I told myself as I started to form a plan.
What if I just did this job naked? Nobody here. Keep the truck clean. Save on laundry: it's win-win ...win! Not to mention I get to be nude.
I had literally written stories before (for my g/f, not shared here) where the protagonist is a cute tourist girl, and comes across a work gang in Colombia or somewhere, and they're all digging the grade for a railroad through the jungle. In that story some pale skinny accountant broad in an air conditioned SUV stops by to berate the whole crew and one guy in particular without even getting out of her vehicle. She just rolls down the window and lets them have it. During this episode the tired sweaty men have to climb up out of their ditch and stand there and take it from this bitch and our heroine, from behind a bush realizes as they come up that they are all naked except for shoes and work gloves. It's just the most practical way to do such grimy work. Our hero, the big one, is actually wearing something, a bandana tied around his thigh. Not for modesty -- it's just that he's so hung, he's got to keep it out of the way of the shovel.
But that's another story. I neither had a bandana nor needed one, and I didn't have a taskmaster yelling at me from her air-conditioned Honda, but I could imagine those things so basically, off I went! I stripped out of my clean t-shirt & board shorts (I usually go commando after swimming, lots of us do. I don't know why, but you feel so clean, and pumped and soft all over from the exhaustion, that minimal clothes seem natural.) As for shoes, I had some old running shoes. Habitually I'd retire the running shoes to yardwork duty when they got worn down, and then mistreat them until they were crap and had to be thrown away. So commonly I wouldn't even waste socks on 'em. These shoes had to be kept outside anyway, so wearing them in the mulch pile was no problem.
Now mulch might have a splinter in it, or even a rare piece of barbed wire, but mostly it is soft. The tree roots and branches have been pulverized as well as shredded. If it wasn't so damn hot, it would be a great place to lay down and nap. Anyway, pretty uneventful after that. I pitchforked the truck full of mulch, snapped a selfie, and was just about ready to leave.
-- ok, this part isn't true any more, but I swear the rest of it was. --
