Leaf Blowers, Snow Removal and the Refusal to Acknowledge the Seasons

When a chill hits the air and leaves start to fall, city dwellers and suburbanites panic. Leaves on the grass, you see, just aren’t tidy. So armies of men with giant leaf blowers on their backs invade, carefully blowing every single leaf off of carefully manicured lawns so the grass looks weirdly just like it did in July.

Other people, and I’m in this crowd, haphazardly rake most of the leaves to the curb even though I know composting is better.

In another fall tradition, our neighborhood listserv explodes into the usual complaints about delays in the city picking up the leaves in huge noisy trucks that haul them off to become compost. That morphs effortlessly into listserv complaints anticipating delays in the city plowing snow that hasn’t fallen yet.

The kids think we’re crazy.

Daughter this year got together with a friend and hid in piles of leaves on the boulevard. When they heard footsteps on the sidewalk they popped out. A neighbor — fortunately with a sense of humor — jumped about a foot. “You scared the liver out of me!” Daughter reported she shrieked. “You HAVE to do that to other people.”

And thus an afternoon was spent popping out of leaf piles at random people.

Son, when he was aged three or so, had to be physically restrained from attacking the city workers picking up leaves he had spent the afternoon jumping into. “They’re STEALING them!” he yelled, glaring at the workers. “I’m playing with them!”

He’s 11, but he and his friends are still piling up leaves and diving, shrieking head first into them. In fact, Son and Daughter will go to neighbor’s lawns and haul their leaves to our house to make the pile bigger. No manicured, July-like lawn for us.

Snow is the same. It’s just a toy, designed to make children happy.

Son and Daughter once spent a memorable afternoon “shoveling” at a West Virginia cabin. I use the apostrophes because they were so young that every time they lifted the shovel of snow, they lifted it too high, over their heads, and it fell behind them. Dozens of times. They screamed with laughter each time snow slid down their backs.

Deer came out of the woods and peered at them from behind the cabin for a long time, astonished at the human fawn ruckus.

But back in suburbia, boring adults have to wreck the fun. First the road gets plowed, well and good, and snow gets piled on corners. But then big trucks come and haul the snow away, which is frankly kind of odd. Can’t it melt in place?

Perhaps two years ago, I was with Daughter walking on Fenton Avenue when we saw a parking lot piled high with snow, and huge trucks were loading it to haul it away and melt it somewhere.

Daughter, like Son before her, was enraged.

“What is the MATTER with those people?” she asked, unable to believe her eyes. “Don’t they have CHILDREN?”