Nov 22, 2023 3 min read

The annual battle is underway: All throughout our neighborhoods, folks are raking and mulching, blowing and bagging all in the yearly effort to get rid of falling leaves.

Is your yard clear yet? If so, it probably won’t be for long. It seems as if the trees are giggling behind our backs playing a little joke on us each autumn. They turn their gorgeous colors with reds and rusts and golds dotting the landscape before gently starting to swirl to the ground in late October.

Every year, I fall into the same timing trap. One of the three trees in our yard turns crimson, then drops its leaves before the other two. I get lured into the process of raking up or blowing the first round down to the curb, where the wonderful street crew comes around to vacuum them up every so often. I keep expecting the other two trees to follow suit, but they don’t. One of them finally started to turn colors and then shed its leaves a couple of weeks ago just when we had our first real frost. It’s nearly done now, so that means we have two out of the three trees empty at this point. This is where the fun just begins.

I keep waiting and waiting and waiting … and I swear our third tree just laughs and waits until it really starts to turn chilly. That’s when it finally lets all of its leaves fade into brown and do a mass exodus across our lawn. My wonderful husband got out the leaf blower last week and tried to corral a bunch of them down to the street’s edge. When I came home from work, they were all neatly blown into huge piles at the side of the street. We mistimed the arrival of the vacuum truck and the next day, the wind kicked up and blew a majority of them back into our yard.

Now, it’s a cat and mouse game with that final tree as we head into Thanksgiving. The sun will be out a few days this week and we still have about half a tree full of leaves left to fall. Will they make it to the ground in time for us to rake and blow them where they belong before the really chilly air arrives? Once the bulk of them are out of the yard, we use the lawnmower to mulch up a light dusting of them everywhere. That also helps me run the leftover gasoline out of the mower in time for winter storage.

Sunday was sunny with temperatures in the 50s. I felt guilty hearing my neighbor’s leaf blower going while I was sitting on the sofa watching the Steelers lose to the Browns before I headed into work. For a moment, I wondered which was more of a chore: raking leaves or watching the Steelers’ ineffective offense?

Kristin Emery can be reached at kristinemery1@yahoo.com.