Cleaning Up

 

Seasons come and seasons go. Some things change, some things do not. My daily walks, even as they continue per usual, now accompanied by the crunch crunch of autumn leaves and an occasional morning with my slightly heavier jacket. I am reminded of a blog I posted a couple years ago. It was entitled “Sidewalk Inspector” (Feb 19, 2021) detailing impressions of my neighborhood based on sidewalks shoveled or not and other related things. This post could be of same title for it is perspective of this inspector who still walks, but I shall be more seasonally specific this time. “Cleaning Up” comes to mind as autumn leaves are falling. 

Autumn leaves make for incredible mess, and also provide interesting vantage on what's important to us. There are those who clean them up slavishly leaf by leaf, and of course those who accept them naturally as a matter of course in windy ordered environment.  [I think I am of the latter category] This has been in my mind these last days as the leaves flutter - not of ultimate importance but ... I think of many things.😉 What a sight to behold; the beautiful green dresses of our huge poplars and birches and other deciduous suddenly ablaze with new colors flowing and floating and blowing all around. Sure enough there he is! This morning it's the sound of my neighbor Richard, gas guzzling air blower corralling his leaves plus his neighbor’s on either side of him into neat piles and then into bags (non-compostable black garbage bags no less … Aargh). It’s his third time out here this year, he says proudly, gotta clean up. “Yup”, I say non-assertively. No need to be sarcastic today. I’ll tease his anality in front of our Tim Horton’s friends one of these mornings.

A little further down the street is another take on cleaning up. This driveway has had little pebble piles and variety of gravel and earth all summer long. This neighbor is so environmentally conscious she is installing a roof drainage system for her lawn and garden so as to utilize rainwater for underground irrigation. And it's a slow process, her trees and garden and driveway looking like a construction site for at least three years by now. I agree with her too - totally affirm her environmental diligence - and also appreciate some pails full of surplus pebbles she has been giving to me. They are now part of the landscaping in my yard!

A couple of blocks down and just around the corner, the other day I discovered another friend. An elderly woman up in her crabapple tree surprised me with the sound of apples plopping into a box as I walked by. My greeting quickly yielded a pailful for an apple jelly project at our place later that evening, plus a few stories of how we used to preserve on the farm back in Saskatchewan (yup we hail from similar open fields), plus in short order she had this younger guy (me) up a ladder to help fill another bucket for her from near top of the tree. I'm thinking her tree has done well this year, just before color change yielding some fine apples and some good neighborliness.

These are specific one by one encounters. And then there is the macro experience. This local sight and sound also brings on a little sentimentalism for me. There is a bigger better picture also in my mind. Who cares who is raking whose leaves anyway? And so what if they don't get all cleaned up? It's better to leave them on the lawns over winter anyway, isn’t it? My wife and daughter certainly say so, reminding me they make a great bed for ladybugs to sleep all winter. 

I live with another set of sensors and leaf memories. None of this Calgary color comes even close to what I gazed upon many times during my long-haul trucking years, especially up and down the Eastern seaboard, Maine, New York, Virginia, West Virginia, Pennsylvania; yes also Indiana and Ohio and Ontario – incredible oranges, yellows and fiery reds sometimes right up to top of the Appalachians! Always I was sorry I couldn’t pick up a load of maple leaves and deliver to Calgary Prince's Island Park just for all to enjoy! 

Having been glamorized by those other trees I am considerably less impressed with my leaf-blowing neighbor and all us ordinary leaf rakers. There is no need to get too preoccupied with the temporary mess they make on our streets and curbs and decks. If we don’t get them all raked, no problem. I live next to Fish Creek Park and the wind can blow them in there. It's a natural wild-type habitat, with room even for all of Pennsylvania's leaves, to say nothing of the Calgary leaves we don’t get raked.

It is the season. Short days ago it was flowers galore, some bordered by neatly cut lawns, others with the more 'natural' look. Seasons come, seasons go. My hope is that the next season just around the corner will provide lots of the white stuff to make it all beautiful regardless of who got what cleaned up.