Men Against Leaves

For an elderly apartment dweller, I have quite a few yard care devices: An electric hedge trimmer, a Toro blower-mulcher and a whole bunch of hand tools including a Wilkinson Sword swoe, an oscillating hoe and a ho-mi, or Korean hand plow. I joke that yardwork is my senior exercise plan.

A mighty noise next door at Connolly's alerted me to the presence of a crew that dwarfed my little-old-lady efforts at fall cleanup. Two guys with blowers were rounding up leaves for ingestion by a huge machine.

It was a distant relative-on-steroids of my blower-mulcher - a machine to master the worst our giant oak tree could do. Despite its unholy racket, I admired its clean-up power.

Our front lawn is still littered with leaves and twigs from the oak tree, because my neighbor and I only clean up the back yard and driveway. We leave the front yard to the landlord, and he leaves it to Father Time and Mother Nature make the leaves go away.

My adult children can still remember the pungent smell of autumn bonfires that once were the standard way of dealing with fallen leaves. Trading air pollution for noise pollution is probably not much of a step up, but that big machine was certainly impressive.

--Bernice