Must Be the Season of the…

… leaf?

The Season

I know you were expecting me to say “must be the season of the witch”, after the Donovan song from 1966/1967. While the mononymous Donovan and his song presaging the psychedelic pop era have their charms, Hallowe’en is regrettably passed. And frankly, New England has a shortage of witches this century. (Yes there are the Wiccans. They’re… well, peculiar, but in no way frightening.)

No, the autumn here in New England is the season of the leaf.

Often you’ll just be going along, and see a sudden flash of color when a tree shows its leaves in a shaft of sunlight. Here’s a random tree in a church parking lot, showing brilliant reds and oranges because an opening let through a column of sunlight to set it off.

I mean, it’s pretty, sure.

But what I really like is the serendipity. You’re just walking along, not thinking about what you see around you and… Nature grabs you by the frontal lobes & says, Look!

Other times, the beauty is just in an unexpected place. This is the Weekend Editrix’s shade garden, in a shady hillside behind Château Weekend. It’s quite nice in the summer, but I was struck by its beauty now as cold and dark are setting in. The hostas in particular are going dormant, to get ready for winter. As they do, their leaves turn a strikingly bright shade of yellow. It’s as though they’re waving good-bye, reminding me that they’ll be back in the spring.

(And if you’ve ever worked with hostas, you know they’ll be back with a vengeance.)

… And the Cleanup

But with all that beauty comes the cleanup, as is so often the case. That means leaf raking/blowing, bagging up, and disposing of the bags of harvested leaves. A lot of that. It’s back-breaking work for an old guy like me, or at least back-sore work.

Here you see this morning’s harvest ready for pickup by our town for composting. There are 40 bags here, each nominally 30 gallons. Though really, that 30 gallon figure assumes you fill only to the fill line which is maybe 3/4 of the way up. These are all full, so probably 40 gallons each.

Together with the 20 bags that were picked up 2 weeks ago, that brings the total to 60 bags of leaves, approximately 40 gallons each, or 2400 gallons. (That’s just a hair over 9 cubic meters.)

I wonder how many leaves that is? Anybody feel like doing a Fermi estimate for me? I tried it with estimating the number of maple spinners/seeds, and got a surprisingly high number.

Now, you may think 60 bags is a lot of leaves, and I agree with you. But the truth is that this is likely only about halfway through the season; last year we did about 120 bags total.

So, there’s some more time with a sore lower back ahead for me. Or, possibly, hiring somebody to help. But it’s overall enjoyable outdoor work so long as I do it in short spurts.

The Weekend Conclusion

The work of preparing for winter each autumn is something I’ve enjoyed since childhood: raking up the leaves, clearing out the gutters & downspouts, bringing in the garden hoses to prevent freezing, and so on.

As you can see here, the Weekend Publisher (the giant black cat) and the Assistant Weekend Publisher (the smaller tabby) are both engaged in winter preparations of their own. They are test piloting the winter comforter on our bed, captured here in an innocent-looking photo from about 3am. Normally they have a dominance battle for space; here we’re seeing the result after they’ve declared pax.

I see yesterday was a very good day for the Democrats. May there be many more, so we can eventually remove, indict, convict, and imprison as many Trumpistas as possible. Then we also can declare pax.

(Ceterum censeo, Trump incarcerandam esse.)

---

Notes & References

Nope.