I Was Thinking... A Fair Wind

Every year at about this time, my neighbors and I make the same lament, “Why did we plant so many trees?”
When we built our houses and moved in 46 years ago, there were no trees, shrubs, or bushes. Previous to being a housing development, this area had been a corn field. Therefore, anything that is there now is something we put there. So that makes it even worse because we have nobody to blame but ourselves.
As new homeowners, we wanted this previous farm field to look like yards. So, we probably over did it and put in lilacs, arborvitaes, pine trees, hedges, dogwoods, maples, willows, and of course ash and elms. It seemed like we had so much room and what we planted looked so small, so we planted things to close together.
Kasson prides itself as a “tree city” and our neighborhood fit right in. The city had a program to plant boulevard trees and many homeowners took advantage of the deal. Now fast forward 40 plus years. Things grew much faster and bigger than we had expected and soon our once sunlit lots were overly shaded.
But now a new trend has developed. In the last four years, almost every house on our block has had at least one tree cut down. Some were victims of disease while others had just gotten too big and were crowding either the house, the driveway, or other trees. But what we still had left produced an abundance of foliage and what seemed like billions of leaves.
While having a diverse variety of trees is good to prevent disease wiping out everything you have, it does lend itself to a separate problem. Different trees drop their leaves at different times.You get the leaves from one tree done and another starts.
My neighbor’s trees start first and usually the north wind blows a good share of them into my yard. They aren’t my trees but because of less than favorable wind, they become my leaves. So, I rake them, bag them, and haul them to the dump.The lawn looks good for a while until the next shedding occurs.
I blow leaves, rake leaves, bag leaves and haul them again and again. Having a truck and a close place to dump them helps a lot. But even when I think I’ve cleaned up the whole yard, I’m seldom done.
I had “finished” the whole yard and most of the leaves had been collected, but it proved to be a false feeling of completion. The next day the wind picked up and sent any leaf in the neighborhood flying. They danced up the street, flew over the lawns, and swirled around the buildings. While most of my lawn was bare, huge piles had been pushed together behind the garage, on the patio, and on and under the deck. Apparently, I still wasn’t done.
Several days of heavy winds hastened the process. The last of my leaves finally let loose and floated down. For a change, the wind came from the south and blew most of them over to the same neighbor who had deposited theirs on my lawn earlier. Now all I had to do was mow the last few still on my lawn. he forecast was for one calm day followed by winds with gusts up to 50 mph the next day. Now my yard was clear, but my neighbor now had become the recipient of most of my leaves.
While I should have felt a little guilty about the big job ahead for them, I then remembered all those leaves of theirs that I’d hauled out. It just seemed like pay back. But by the end of the next day, all those leaves next door had been blown to somewhere near Berne. Somehow, the fair winds of fall had worked its magic and had cleared their lawn. But it didn’t seem fair to me at all.
Did You Ever Wonder? — Why is it that no black plastic bag will open from the end you try first?