Leaf Me A Lawn

It’s almost time for the World Series. Meanwhile, professional football is on television every Sunday, Monday, and Thursday with high school football under the lights on Fridays and college football dominating Saturday afternoons with both professional basketball and hockey just starting.

Sports and Autumn just seem to go together. The air is crisp and filled with the scent of picked apples, even by those of us who don’t eat apples, and let’s face it nothing says fall like a set of new pumpkin-spice-scented brake pads on the family jalopy. 

But that’s NOT what Autumn in New England is about. Nope. 

Around here we grab our trusty old leaf blower, slap on those mickey mouse earphones so the engine’s roar doesn't deafen us like those Iron Maiden concerts in the Eighties used to do (still have the Run For The Hills tee-shirt, do you?) and then work gathering up the fallen leaves in piles, placing them in the backyard composter with the active biologicals combined with cut grass and moisture to produce the enriched matter for our spring lawns.

Though more likely, not.

Most of us have gas-powered leaf blowers because they have a louder and more satisfying roar than those electric ones; you can go anywhere with them, and they can blow any and all leaves you find on/near your property out into the street or onto a neighbor's property, because somewhere in an obscure codicil of the Bill of Rights or an addendum to the Articles of Confederation grandfathered into the Constitution is a provision about the right to arm bears, be obnoxiously loud, befoul the air with gasoline fumes, and poison your relationships with your neighbors.

Leaf blowers are uniquely American-no one else has them and most people in whose countries I've lived or visited cannot comprehend having a device as pointless and wasteful as a leaf blower. In many ways, it's more perfectly symbolic of the United States than the bald eagle and is the closest thing an appliance could ever come to representing (and encapsulating) our entire election system.

Except that it wouldn't work, because all successful sports in the USA have television contracts, I can see a new national sports craze where people in golf carts drive around (blindfolded? why not?), talking on a cell phone while a partner in the shotgun seat operates a leaf blower trying to coerce a small animal, perhaps a ferret dipped in iridescent paint (Fox Sports' experiment with the blue glowing hockey puck some years back has made an indelible impression upon me) into a shoebox that closes down with a satisfying snap on the little furry fugitive with points awarded for the number of passes it takes to herd the ferret into the box.

Of course, everyone would be so busy competing for a place on a local team that leaves might fall unnoticed for decades, renewing the earth and returning to it some of the nutrients and minerals we have thoughtlessly plundered from it in our evolution from the primordial ooze to cheese or parrot heads and foam (middle and otherwise) fingers we wear to differentiate us from the lower primates. 

And remember, like snowflakes, and leaves, no two of us are alike.
Too bad you can’t hear my point.
-bill kenny