Evolution of Autumn

Remember these days?

We’re still on the front lines here with leaves.
When we moved here, an acre and a half sounded just perfect. Maybe we should have thought a little more deeply about the fact that most of that is woods. When fall arrives, the chickens really come home to roost.

          Now granted, the leaves in the woods pretty much drop where they are and nature takes its course. However, we still have enough open land to make leaf season something of a marathon.

          Fortunately, we’ve progressed lightyears from the bad old days of city living when everything had to be stuffed into bags. You would have thought that with our postage stamp-sized yard this wouldn’t have been a big deal, but our city house had been built in the 1920s and the ancient maples in our yard – all four of them – left us under an avalanche of leaves every year.

         Here in our small town not only are we no longer dependent on other people to haul away our leaves (they go into our woods where they magically disappear by spring), our tools have evolved as well. Sure, we still use rakes and tarps from time to time, but our favorite weapon is our blower, a blessing for those of us without the upper body strength to rake for four hours at a clip.

          These days, we’re loud and proud. I unreel three miles of extension cords and torque up my blower. Mr. Welcome wheels out a push model capable of somersaulting unsuspecting chipmunks and squirrels clear across the yard. Some weekends we’re like a conquering army, marching down the street side by side with our neighbor and his blower, pushing autumn’s harvest to the cul-de-sac and over the embankment into the woods at the end.

          Yesterday, though, I discovered the ultimate method.

          Do you, by any chance, know anyone who hitches up his jeans as though heading out to a world where only real men survive and announces, as though making the ultimate sacrifice, “Well, I guess I’d better go cut the lawn!” Then you look outside and there he is, riding around on the lawn tractor, maybe a soda in the cup holder and a headset full of tunes on his head. Yesterday I joined this club.

          Rain was in the forecast and neither of us wanted to devote

the rest of the afternoon to the yard, so instead I hitched up old Betsy. By grinding up what had fallen, the small bits left would be a lot easier to move at a later date. 

          It was just plain fun. The temperature was 70 degrees, a soft wind was blowing, and there I was, enjoying one of the last good days of fall.