WHAT?!?

Many of us refer to the World Series as the Fall Classic, while, for others, autumn is a time to watch professional football on television every Sunday, Monday, and occasional Thursday while high school football happens under the lights on Fridays and college football is reserved for Saturday afternoons, and evenings and, seemingly random weekday nights.

None of those, in my opinion, are what Autumn in New England is all about. 

What defines the season here is gassing up the old leaf blower, slapping on the Mickey Mouse earphones so the roar of the engine doesn't deafen you like those Iron Maiden shows of the early Eighties used to do (still have the tee-shirt, do you? Run for the Hills indeed!) and then gathering up the falling and fallen leaves, getting them together in large piles and placing them into your composter (I have two of them I got from Norwich Public Works in the corner of the backyard along with the active biologicals I combine with the cut grass and moisture to produce the enriched matter I used to work into my tomato patch in the spring). 

Or not.

Many people with leaf blowers have the gasoline-powered versions because they're just a lot louder than the electric ones and you can go anywhere with those bad boys, and they can blow any and all leaves they find on their 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 your right to arm bears and to be obnoxiously loud, befoul the air with gasoline fumes and poison your relationships with those living next to you.

Leaf blowers are uniquely American. To my knowledge, no one else on earth has them and most people in whose countries I've lived or visited cannot comprehend having a device as irritating and harmful to the atmosphere as a leaf blower. In many ways, it's a better symbol of the United States than the bald eagle, in my opinion, and maybe the closest thing any appliance could come to representing most of our recent Presidential election campaigns.

Except that it wouldn't work, because all successful sports have television contracts, I can see a new national sports craze with people in golf carts driving around (blindfolded? why not!), talking on a cell phone while their 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 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. Points are awarded for the fewest passes required to herd the ferret into the box. And the winner gets to defend themselves from allegations they cheated. 

Ideally, everyone would be so busy trying out for a place on one of our local teams that the 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 as we evolved from the primordial ooze to the clad-head-to-toe-in-officially-licensed-team-paraphernalia we wear that differentiates us from the lower primates and others on this orb. Thankfully, like snowflakes (and leaves), no two of us are the same.
-bill kenny

Leaves of Brown Came Falling through the View

We have no trees on our property. I mention that because this time of year walking from the front porch to the street in front of the house involves wading, yes wading, through two and three foot deep piles of leaves that have gotten pinned against the wall that joins the property to the city sidewalk. Every imaginable color and shape of leaf. If you stand still in and among them, you can hear the squirrels, who usually hang out in the back yard waiting for our daughter Michelle to feed them peanuts, working their way through the leaves in search of the bi-ped whom they have every historical reason to believe NEVER leaves the house without peanuts to feed them.

I hate when I'm coming home in the afternoon and get out of the car to open the garage and one of the 'guys' spots me from a tree branch and starts a mad dash towards the car. The object, in the squirrel's mind, is to get to me before I get back in, so s/he can scarf up one of more peanuts and dash off. The flaw, as you've guessed, is I'm not equipped with the peanut dispenser option-not even the LL Bean model of the Forester comes with that. Chances of making the squirrels understand this: less than zero. Everyday the same drill. I know better than to stock up on peanuts, because if I ever do flip a peanut to one or more, I'll be buried by them as they'll just assume I've been holding out on them all this time.

The squirrels are starting to get their whiter shade of fur (I checked with the estate of Keith Reid, and they said that was okay) which, because we're practically to mid-November in New England is the way things should be I suppose. I've started to wonder idly if areas of the world with palm trees have squirrels or chipmunks, but suspect I'll never bother to find out for myself though thirty or more years ago I was keen to see it all and do it all.

Instead, I stand on my front porch and watch an oak leaf, almost perfectly pirouette, stem first, in very tiny circles from high over head and land in the ever-expanding pile of leaves that have blanketed the sidewalk on our side of Lincoln Avenue. In the winter months, it's best to be on the odd side of the street, numerically speaking, because of how the sun rises and the manner and length of its rays helps clear the ice and snow from the walks with less effort required than that of our neighbors on the opposite side.

One of the trade-offs, though, is November as the winds turn raw and blustery and blow in from the coast driving before them all the leaves that short weeks earlier had seemed like garland on tree branches across the region. Those days are behind us now, as the daylight grows shorter a little more every day through the Winter Solstice. Breeze blows leaves of a musty colored yellow. The cycle of the season continues within and without us as the days dwindle down.

-bill kenny