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November 11, 2005
Real men (and women) don’t use leaf-blowers
At my house, one of the rituals of autumn is the raking of the leaves. The older I get, the harder it is on my arm and shoulder muscles, but part of me looks forward to it. One pleasure is in remembering raking with each of my sons, now off living their own lives.
This year, like nature itself, I was late. Weekend trips and guests, other chores and last weekend’s rain had kept me from the leaves. This would have been no problem except that in Concord the truck that comes around to suck up the leaves at the roadside comes only once, and you can never be quite sure when. At least I don’t know.
Yesterday, my wife Monique spotted the truck in the neighborhood. She had today off, so I enlisted her as my helpmate in a first-light assault on the leaves. We’d hardly begun when we heard the leaf truck one block over. I raked furiously while she lifted the piles of leaves into trash cans. Together we ran the cans to the curb, dumped them and headed back to the golden blanket of leaves in our back yard. All the while we listened for the truck and tried to gauge how near it was, how soon it might arrive.
Because of the speed with which we raked, I missed my normal reverie in this task. I missed concentrating on the sound of the leaves, although I smelled them in the sun and smelled their dampness in the shadows. There is always something interesting under the leaves, but today I paused only once over a discovery.
Near where we keep the trash cans, I was suddenly raking what I thought was broken glass. I called to Monique, asking if she knew what might have happened. Then I realized it was not glass but ice – a sheet of it that had formed on a trash can lid after the last rain and then slid off into the leaves. The work had heated us so that I was shocked it had been cold enough to freeze water and keep it frozen.
Of course, the ice sent the same message as the bare black maple branches pointing to the morning sky: It’s coming. Winter is coming.
The leaf truck was coming, too. We went in and made coffee, and when Monique looked out the front window, the leaves were gone.
It all went so fast.
Posted by Mike Pride at November 11, 2005 07:29 PM
Comments
This is a nice entry. Thanks.
Posted by: Ben at November 12, 2005 02:11 PM