It's that time of year! I love fall! I love the colors, being able to wear jeans, going to my children's' sporting events and decorating the house for Halloween. But what I don't like about fall is the annual raking-of-the-leaves ritual.
It's not that I mind raking and leaf blowing that much. Truthfully, I love my leaf blower; even though it does blow the mulch all over when I'm trying to clean out my garden beds. It's just the fact that I will have to clean up the leaves at least five or six times. The first time is fun. The kids and I make leaf piles...I get out my camera...when we are done we schlep big tarps full of leaves down to the woods.
The second time...still kind of fun. The third time, the kids abandon all the fun before the piles are even formed. The fourth time, my daughter's hands will be freezing before she even steps out the door and, well, so on and so forth--you get the idea.
I live in a heavily wooded neighborhood. "Gorgeous" would be a good word to describe it. It really is. But it comes with a price.
The only thing is, that other than the trees in between my neighbor's and my driveway, on one side, I'm the only house without a wooded front yard. All my trees are back behind my house, and to one side. Everyone else has trees all over their front yards and guess where all the leaves from my neighbor's house across the street go? They fall down on the ground and sit there until the wind blows them all on to MY yard.
Well, that's not entirely true. Depending on which way the wind blows they either blow on my yard, or the neighbor to her north. This annual event really bonds me with the neighbor to her north. We wave and commiserate with one another as we both are out there, cleaning up the leaves, yet again!
I know it is not my neighbor's fault, exactly. Like my dad says, "it's mother nature." But as we get in to November and it is FREEZING outside and I am out there, yet again, because I don't want to go into winter and have all those leaves kill my lawn, it's kind of hard to be upset with Mother Nature.
I kind of feel that if my neighbors across the street would pick up their leaves at least a couple of times, they all wouldn't blow into my yard.
Anyways, I know this is petty, really. And it is fabulous exercise, so I do try to keep that in mind. Hopefully I won't get tennis elbow like last year where I couldn't raise my arm more than halfway up my body. So, since I am done griping, here is a picture of the first successful, group clean-up of 2008. I even got a neighbor kid to get in on the action. Though he did disappear before the clean-up began. Hmmm, how did that happen?
