Phthursday Musings: LEAF EMERGENCY!

Let me tell you all about LEAF EMERGENCY!

The most recent one occurred last Thursday, but it won’t be the last. Oh, it won’t be the last.

Now see here: We have a corner lot. Along a boulevard. And on our property, in the berm, or whatever you want to call that strip between the sidewalk and the street, there are seven mature trees.

And so when October rolls around - but, let’s face it, when November rolls around - we are blanketed by color. Oh, the color is lovely! Don’t get me wrong!

But we live in a suburb where the village comes and scoops up leaves. And so people push their leaves into the street. Where they blow around. Most inevitably, back onto our property. And so the onus is on us to get all these leaves the hell out of here.

But, you never know for sure when the scoops are going to arrive. So you have to wait for a morning glimpse. And when you get that tipoff: LEAF EMERGENCY!

Now here is the thing you must understand: They show up twice, once for each side of the street! On day one, they deal with the west side of north-south streets, and the north side of east-west streets. We’re at a northeast corner, so one side got the treatment on Wednesday. But the other side, the one where we accumulate the most leaves, was probably going to get the treatment on Thursday. But we weren’t sure, until we saw a truck two blocks over on Thursday morning.

That is when I fully sprang into action. Now, to be clear, I couldn’t simply push every leaf into the street. They were too fast for that. But there were other things I could do.

First, though, I’d like to introduce some of the culprits:

This is MacGregor, our largest tree. I am informed that MacGregor is a non-fruiting mulberry tree. Isn’t that neat? Really, I kind of feel bad about declaring MacGregor to be a culprit. But the largest tree is the largest tree.

MacGregor is at least a reasonable life form. I am not able to say the same about McGillicuddy:

McGillicuddy is a sycamore. Today is November 16, and McGillicuddy is still retaining most of its leaves.

Now, you might say, if McGillicuddy is retaining its leaves, it can’t actually be a participating contributor to LEAF EMERGENCY!, right? But what McGillicuddy does is insert existential dread. Because the reality is that the leaves are still going to be there until after the next LEAF EMERGENCY! It is a terrifying prospect.

McGillicuddy simply doesn’t conform to things like the Groot trash hauling schedule. Or to other niceties, like, hey pal how about if you don’t rain bark on me? And every so often, McGillicuddy drops “branches”, but these are not real branches, they are gnarls. McGillicuddy sure does look pretty sometimes, but other times, I just have to wonder what exactly the point is of having allowed myself to be subjected to the whims of such a life form.

Truly, the sycamore tree is the arboreal equvalent of a cat.

There is one other culprit which must be noted:

This chain link fence has no name. How ridiculous do you think I am, do you seriously think that I would name a fence? It’s not like it’s a calculator.

The problem which you can see is that a whole lot of leaves wind up stuck in the yard, while a whole lot of other leaves wind up blown up against the outside of the fence. The prevailing wind around here is primarily southwest to northeast, with the boulevard acting as a wind tunnel, so both fence lines accrue a whole lot of leaves, accentuating the challenge.

And now it is time to introduce you to my helpers:

That’s a big old True Temper rake, and probably a little old True Temper rake too, though there’s no label remaining to verify. And, yes, that’s a rain barrel, with the top cut off. It never worked very well as a rain barrel, but, reuse, recycle! Its primary purpose is actually to be a home for implements like these very rakes, and also various shovels and hoes and sodbusters and brushes on poles and whatever else lives in that corner of the garage. But it is fully capable of transitioning into a leaf barrel. Not pictured is my primary snow shovel, which is much more useful than the large rake at moving leaves on the sidewalk, because it’s pushing rather than pulling.

The other thing you see here is an EGO electric leaf blower, and that thing is powerful. Its main battery is also used by the EGO electric weed trimmer, and that thing is violent. But it can also use the larger battery from the EGO electric lawn mower, and that thing is thorough. I am not being remunerated by the EGO corporation here when I say that any of you who need to get over it, get over it, these are the power implements you should be using, there is no damn reason to have a gas powered push mower or weed trimmer or leaf blower anymore.

Now, what the village does it takes a truck and attaches what might be considered the leaf equivalent of a snow plow blade, pushing leaves into big piles at intersections. Luckily one of the big piles winds up against the boulevard, just across the street from us. This is what it looks like:

This was the pile before I started adding to it, and I don’t know why, but it was already significantly larger than other piles I saw up and down the boulevard.

I was never going to be able to push all of the leaves into the street before they were pushed into the big pile. This was especially true of leaves in the yard. Now, we are advised by the village to bag what we can. But all leaves, bagged or piled like this, ultimately wind up in a big green Groot truck. So if it was more straightforward to coalesce the leaves into the big pile, that made a lot more sense to me. And so that’s what I set out to do.

I blew leaves from all over the yard and anywhere else I could find toward the front corner.

I pushed leaves outside the fence into the street after the street had been cleared, but came back later and shoveled them toward the pile.

I collected numerous barrels full of leaves from the yard and went and dumped them on top of the big pile.

And the only way any of this made sense was for it all to be done in the couple of hours after the construction of the big pile and before the pile got hauled away. This, friends, is why this was truly a LEAF EMERGENCY!

At the end of the day, the LEAF EMERGENCY! was substantially resolved:

But we’re only another week or so away from the next one. Now if I could only get McGillicuddy to get with the program and shed. SHED NOW, TREE!

I know you were all worried that this whole thing would be about LEAF EMERGENCY! Never fear, I will not leaf you wanting!

Would you prefer a standard:

Or something more recent:

Oh hey, it’s a live one!

And then there is this, the most on-the-nose song I could find, and my goodness, if you knew this existed, more power to you:

It was either first or second grade. I had the same teacher, Mrs. Erikson, both years, and this was like 40 years ago, so I am to be forgiven for not being sure which year it was. We were supposed to do a leaf project, one of those things where you go find a maple leaf and then write in big crayon MAPLE and the same thing with OAK and whatever else you might find.

I did not turn in my leaf project.

I do not really remember why this did not happen. The reason I remember the whole thing at all is because it’s written on my report card from that quarter.

What I do know is that, with the exception of the maple leaf, I am awful at leaf identification. I am awful at plant identification generally. And when you’re a kid who is good at a lot of things that “prove you’re smart”, when you encounter something that’s truly challenging, you might have a tendency to run away from it completely. Or, hey, you might go the opposite direction, and fight through the challenge.

Time isn’t infinite, so it’s not like you can just leap into any and every challenge you might wish to. What I find though as I get older is that I’m interested not just in different challenges but even different kinds of challenges. I have ideas for paintings in mind, even though I’m traditionally terrible at drawing and painting. I’d be legitimately interested in taking an ornithology class and struggling to identify birds. I kind of can’t stand most poetry, and yet am seriously considering submitting a couple of pieces to a couple of publications.

I try to include my family in some of these zany ideas, but there are understandable limits. The weird kid around here is not at all art inclined, and I can’t quite imagine him taking to participating in creating abstract paintings. The weird wife around here is absolutely not going to go catalog birds. But I do manage to engage them in other endeavors, like Pizza Around Illinois. (We’re always looking for suggestions!)

Every so often I think about that leaf project I didn’t do. It would be a little difficult to do it right now what with the mess that everything is outside, but I wonder, do grownups do leaf projects? Wouldn’t be it be cool if we had a class to show and tell to? Okay, now most of you are probably terrified imagining having to do a show and tell. But still!

To get a little meta to wrap all this up:

I’m not going so far as to suggest that you all should have your own Substack, or that you should in any other form necessarily take things and blow them out into over-the-top stories like I try to.

Many of you though are going to experience something very similar to LEAF EMERGENCY! in upcoming days or weeks. And if you just think about it in terms of argh these damn leaves argh stop blowing around in the wind argh what a pain argh my rake is missing seven teeth argh argh argh then that’s no way to think about things!

If a co-worker asks you what you’re doing this weekend, why would you tell them you’re going to rake up a bunch of leaves, when instead you can talk about LEAF QUEST! or NOVEMBER RAIN OF LEAVES! or BLAST IT, McGILLICUDDY! or whatever else you might want to say to describe the thrill of racing against a combination of nature and trucks to try and make yourself look like a responsible neighbor, if only for six hours?

Seriously, why shouldn’t you name your trees? Or, hey, why not your rakes? You’re not sure what kind of a name you would give to a rake? Here, I’ll give you a few names to try out: For Goodness Rake! Toothy McGee! Leaf Eater! The Sycamore Swatter! Kevin!

We almost all have to deal with some drudgery. We should be thankful to be able to deal with some drudgery. People who deal with no drudgery are living far more difficult lives than we are. But why should we wallow in the drudgery? Embrace it! Attack it! Name it!

Alright, I’ve probably gotten as much out of this as I can. For now. I will now leaf you to your own devices.