Leaves

I live in the suburbs, in an old-fashioned Levitt neighborhood filled with colonial, ranch, and Cape Cod-style houses built in the late 1960s. If you grew up in the 70s and 80s and 90s in America, then you’d probably picture something like my neighborhood when you hear the word “suburbia.” 

In the suburbs, you cut your grass and you shovel your snow and you rake your leaves. Well, someone does all of that, and it’s usually not me. My husband and sons have always been in charge of the outside of the house, and I have always been in charge of the inside of the house. It’s not necessarily a good bargain for me, but it at least keeps me out of the cold and rain. 

But it wasn’t cold today. It was a balmy, mild early November day. Our yard, front and back, is buried in leaves, and no one has been home to deal with them, except me. So I finished work at 4 today, fired up the leaf blower and went to work. 

Yes, yes, leaf blowers. I know. Everyone hates them. Well, not everyone, because a lot of people including me have leaf blowers and so it’s not possible that all these people have leaf blowers, and that everyone also hates leaf blowers. That doesn’t add up. That math doesn’t work. 

It’s more accurate to say that certain influential, thought-leader-type people hate leaf blowers. For example, there is a very prominent historian and writer who sometimes dedicates an entire issue of his Substack newsletter (one day, I’m going to write about Substack) to his hatred of leaf blowers. He especially hates gas-powered leaf blowers and I suppose I don’t blame him. But most of this man’s leaf blower opposition centers around noise. My leaf blower is battery powered so it’s not discharging fumes into the air. But it is loud. And I don’t care. I have too many leaves to gather them all with a rake. I don’t use the leaf blower early in the morning, nor later than 7 PM or so, so I’m not waking people up first thing in the AM nor keeping them awake at night. I don’t use it very often at all, full stop.  And who said that Mr. Man was entitled to perfect quiet and peace at every moment of the day, anyway? Rich people really are something else. I wonder what he does with his leaves. I am guessing that other people take care of his landscaping and his other menial chores, leaving him free to complain about the noise as the poors clean up their ramshackle little properties. 

Really, every time I hear a rich person complaining about leaf blowers, I want to go and buy a jackhammer. 

God, I’m petty. LOL. 

*****

My front yard is pretty big, because we don’t have sidewalks in our neighborhood. I think that sidewalkless streets with lawns that slope right down to the road were a suburban ideal in the late 1960s. We have three shade trees out front, and those three trees drop a great deal of leaves. Somewhere between a boat load and a shit ton, if we’re being exact. With a rake, it would take all day to wrangle those leaves into a pile. With the leaf blower, it took me one hour. I moved in methodical rows, the leaves swirling and eddying as I blew them down toward the ever growing leaf pile. I watched with satisfaction as neat green paths of grass opened through the leaves until the entire front yard was pretty much clear. 

*****

That was Tuesday, and now it’s Friday, a Federal government holiday and an unearned gift of a day off, which is my favorite kind. Blowing those leaves was much more fun than I expected; so much so that I would like to do more today, but it’s raining and I’m not going to do yard work on a 55-degree rainy November day. It was also much more physically demanding than I’d have guessed. The leaf blower is heavy, but it’s well balanced, so you don’t necessarily notice how heavy it is until you blast leaves for an hour. I had to stop because it gets dark so stupidly early now but I’d have had to stop anyway because I was physically exhausted, and my hands hurt so much that I had a hard time holding on to a glass of water. But I was fine the next day, and my front yard looked very nice. 

*****

It’s Saturday now. I might have planned to do the rest of the yard today, a beautiful sunny, not-too-cold November day, but I have to drive to Philadelphia in a few minutes to see my mom, who is not in good health. That’s probably all I have to say about that right now. Except that she probably can’t live in her house anymore. She can’t take care of herself there, and she certainly can’t take care of that house. There aren’t many leaves to rake - there are no more than five trees on the entire street - but the house has three stories and a dungeon-like basement, and no first-floor bathroom. She hasn’t really been able to live there reasonably for some time but she is stubborn and would never listen to the slightest suggestion that she downsize and find an accessible and safe place to live. But she fell last night and ended up in the emergency room, and likely cannot return to the house at all. And so I think that someone else is probably going to have to finish our fall yardwork here in the Maryland suburbs. I have some work to do in the city.