I had been watching the leaves pile in the yard for weeks, a ruthless land-grab upon the grass with no end to its expansion in sight. Every time I stepped outside, the leaves quivered on their branches before diving to their death. Each time I returned home from a short outing, nature had done the impossible: It replaced every single maple leaf to have fallen with a new leaf, ready to take the plunge.
These trees were like sharks — tiger sharks — with rows of teeth ready to assume the position of the ones lost. It may look all Norman Rockwell to have a tree standing sentinel in the yard, bursting with orange leaves, but, in reality, it represents something more sinister. This is a National Geographic episode that never ends. This is no lion pouncing on a gazelle because that gazelle’s heart eventually stops beating and the lion goes to sleep with the gazelle inside its belly. Not the case with the trees. Their leaves just keep on falling, an insatiable lust for gravity that cannot be quelled by man — or lion.
I walked to the mailbox, ready to collect the day’s bills, the only other thing apart from leaves to never abate, when I stopped short. Across the street lay the neighbor’s yard, foot after foot of green prickly grass, completely denuded of leaves. My eyes widened, and I turned slowly to face the surrounding houses. Each house had a yard again. There was no patchwork quilt of orange and brown covering their lawns. Where had their leaves gone?
I wondered if there had been some kind of leaf amnesty program to sweep the neighborhood, and I had been overlooked. I remembered the time all of my best friends in elementary school decided to wear purple one Thursday and forgot to tell me. As my mind traveled through the myriad conspiracist possibilities as they applied to communist leaf cleanup programs and alien leaf abductions, a neighbor whose name I didn’t know, waved at me before busying himself with the gutters of his home.
“Hey,” I called out in my best borrow-a-cup-of-sugar voice. “What happened to your leaves?”
I fixed my smile, put my hands on my hips and set my shoulders as wide as they could go, attempting to obscure his view into my yard, which had become the Ottoman Empire of fall.
He looked at me plainly before saying, “I raked them.”
I laughed two different laughs, the first one in earnest because I believed he was joking and then I shifted gears into a second laugh that was meant to make him believe I was joking. I walked back to my house with a downtrodden gait, understanding — for the first time — that no amount of wishing, praying, rainfall or wind would gather up every last leaf in my yard and deposit them elsewhere, such as my neighbor’s yard. This work was squarely on me.
After assessing my inventory of tools and supplies and determining the closest thing I owned to a rake was a serving fork, I realized there are two kinds of people in this world: People who own rakes and people who call their ex-husbands to borrow a leaf blower. I figured the image of me holding a leaf blower must have provided the basis for his charitable decision to loan it to me. Little did I realize that holding a leaf blower was nothing compared to getting one to start, and that surely was the part that held the comedy for him.
I’ve stood before many a device I could not figure out how to turn on. I descend from a long line of women who will live with the same television setup for 25 years without ever learning how to operate it. That said, I have never had to involve my lower extremities nor have I dislocated a scapula in the handling of any household appliances until this particular device. I was at the precipice of giving up, settling for a life empty of industry and a yard full of leaves, when my last tug on the cord set something into motion. The machine came to life with a jolt and blew out a stream of air so purposeful and strong I was certain I should have completed some kind of certificate program before having put myself in this situation.
The leaves took flight, dancing in the air before landing in a pile of my design. A pile that I built. Blowing leaves into a heap may not be like building the Parthenon or laying superhighways, but there was something intoxicating in the enterprise of taking nature and making it follow your lead, such as Moses did with the Red Sea. Except this actually happened. Like early humans who were once dazzled by the instant gratification and convenience of things such as wheels and hammerstones, I could not stop grunting the most basic and obvious, things such as “this thing good” and “this thing fast.”
I stood in the middle of my barren yard, the soles of my shoes making contact with terra firma instead of a memory foam mattress of leaves, the leaf blower still humming away in my hand when one of the children yelled for me to come inside for a minute. I started to switch off the leaf blower when I hesitated, realizing that I would probably never get it started again. I laid it down softly in the green grass it alone unearthed, its spout still spewing hot air against nothing, and turned toward the house. Just as I was about to cross through the door, I looked back to make sure it hadn’t blown itself right into a different neighborhood. That’s when I saw it: An orange leaf dislodged from its perch and sailed down to my grass with so much spite and fury.
I’ll be keeping that leaf blower on for the next couple of months.