Leave It!

There was an article in the Boston Globe last week giving us permission not to rake our lawn. It said "Seriously, Johnny and Erin, we know you're busy. Just don't worry about it this year. Your neighbors won't mind in the slightest. Trust us."

No. Really what it said was that if you have maple treed (which we do) and you don't care that much about the artificial glory of your lawn (which we don't -- expecially over under the maple trees, where it's mostly moss anyway because it never gets any sun), then you might as well just leave it. It will rot by spring and be good for what grass is actually there. Maybe run it over with the lawn mower to speed up the breakdown process.

See, the thing is, in this yard, for some reason -- and not in any of the other yards on the street, incidentally, our leaves generally refuse to fall. The entire rest of the state will be all bony-looking and prepared for winter, and we're still all lush and thick and yellow. Then we wake up one late November morn and whump, they fall at once.

It's annoying, because by that point we only have about a week and a half before the snow starts, and it's too cold to be out there raking (although not this year, to be honest, it hasn't been too cold this year at all). And god forbid it rains in those nine days, because then we have to rake up wet leaves. And never mind that I'm Destructo and -- I swear to god -- every single year my rake breaks in the middle of the job and I have to go swearing out and buy a new one.

Grr.

A few eyars ago I bought this stupid contraption for two hundred and fifty dollars. You're supposed to push it around and it rakes all the leaves up into a sort of sack, which you then empty into your bag or compost pile. It works, after a fashion. Except it doesn't get any of the dug-in, stubborn leaves, and the goddamn sack gets filled up in three damn square feet of lawn. I used it once, and then I couldn't return it because I had used it, and now it's in our basement, mocking me.

So anyway here we were again, with a leaf-covered lawn and ten days till snowtime, and the Universe up and sent us a message through the Globe. So we're leaving it this year, to see what happens. We've been meaning to do that bit with the lawn mower, though. Any day now, I swear to god.

But then I had a dream last night that I woke up this morning and some old man neighbor (not anyone real, just a dream-neighbor) was out there raking up my yard. I didn't know whether to be pissed at him or grateful -- but either way, I knew I was offended when I saw that he had built a sort of fence to shield the neighborhood from the vision of our crap-filled veranda. Bastard.

I can't begin to tell you how relieved I was when I woke up for real and discovered our yard still reassuringly blanketed with rotting leaves.

And they smell good, too!