Sunday, November 06, 2005
FALLING LEAVES
One of the assets of living in Ohio is the fall leaf color which can be truly spectacular when at its peak. Even as they come down, dancing in the breeze, and swirling in little hurricanes of yellow, brown, and red, they are beautiful. A walk in the woods in October or November, crunching those leaves underfoot and kicking them out of the way, is one of life's little pleasures. But there is a price to pay for all that enjoyment, especially when you live with a lot of trees for company.
In days gone by, the leaves were raked up and burned, after the children were finished jumping in them. The smell of burning leaves lingers pleasantly in my memory still. But then came the burning bans that brought with them the bagging chore. As everyone became more and more busy, the leaf pick-up service was invented.
For those of you who don't live with autumn leaves, the way it works is that most communities in the suburbs provide the service in the form of a truck with a large vacuum that sucks up the leaves from the devil strip and hauls them to a place where they are composted. For about six weeks in the fall, cleaning up the yard takes priority. On my street, leaf pick-up occurs early Monday morning every other week. That means that the leaves must be hauled to the curb some time over the weekend. Yesterday afternoon was the time to haul them at our house. My husband and I worked until dark and got the yard relatively leaf free. The entire devil strip was filled with leaves, and we finished feeling good about the job we had accomplished. The same thing was going on in other yards up and down the street.
Last night a weather front came through, and what brings in a new weather front? Wind, of course. And you know what wind does to dry leaves. About half of them are still on the curb. The others are scattered all over the yard again along with the newly fallen. Since the wind continues to blow too hard to go out there and clean them up, those leaves are going to sit in the yard until the next scheduled leaf pick-up.
Even with this drawback, and even though it adds $3 a month to the property taxes, I'm still thankful for leaf pick-up service. Bagging leaves is the biggest chore of disposing of them. It would take at least 30 lawn and leaf bags to get all of them out of our yard. Something else I thank God for every fall is the man who invented the leaf blower. What takes two hours with a leaf blower and leaf pick-up service used to take all day!
