It’s raining leaves today, our annual festival of falling
color. Out every window we can see vivid
fall colors, across the road, down the street, beyond the next door neighbors. Because it has been a different weather
pattern year, the crape myrtles, which are usually glorious this time of year
with red and yellow and gold leaves, mostly just dried up and dropped after an
early freeze. But the oaks and the
sweetgums and the Bradford pears and many others, whose names I do not know, are
more beautiful every day.
We have a
kind of love-hate relationship with the leaves.
When the trees are green and it is hot weather, they give us wonderful
shade and shelter and make all the difference to our comfort inside and
out. When the leaves turn, they make a
kind of visual poem to autumn and simply lift our hearts with their
beauty. When they are raked and chopped
and composted, the leaves turn into mulch and eventually compost, a type of
home-grown plant food for the garden.
But in between the time the leaves start turning and the time they are
all raked and chopped and stacked, the leaves become rather difficult
playmates, because they ride wind currents right into our garden room, if we
sweep them off the patio they simply seem to blow right back toward us, they
hitch a ride on our cat’s fur, and they create for us a lot of work.
Today I vacuumed up all the leaves on the
patio, then I raked some that were damp into a pile too wet to vacuum and
pushed and pulled the pile around the corner to the south side of the house,
because today we have a south wind and they would just come back. Tonight we are due what is called a cold
spell and the wind will change around to the north. Either way, hopefully that leaf pile
will not come back toward our back door,
and either way our cat will likely make a joyful nest there.
No comments:
Post a Comment