She said she’d consider doing it again if I add sprinkles to the crème glacée. How quickly time passes when having fun: in 30 minutes the backyard was wearing its pre-fall face. We got busy, and as I supplied the French word, we both chuckled at her attempts to wrap her tongue around the new vocabulary. But when I reached into my memory for almost forgotten French vocabulary for trees, leaves, rake, broom, scoop and bag, she changed her tune. Even with the bribe, our five-year-old granddaughter wasn’t overly excited about the task. It involved a bribe of mac and cheese followed by mint chocolate ice cream. Now, to assuage my aversion to the solitary exercise of raking and bagging, I called for grandchild reinforcements. The dinner hour is his favourite time to start it up and suck up every leaf on his lot, from the roof of his porch to the sidewalk and street for several metres on either side of his house. It’s as loud as a hot rod without a muffler. Obsessive, where he should shove his leaf blower. I don’t exaggerate when I tell you that my wife is one of the calmest people this side of the Rockies, but yesterday, I had to strongly discourage her from marching up the street to tell he, whom we call Mr. However, without a trace of irony, this avid golfer added that leaf blowers are absolutely essential for golf course maintenance crews to keep the fairways and greens clear. They should be banned outright in the city of Toronto he declared. He labelled them among the worst noise polluters ever invented as well as being wicked for the environment. He was in his cups at the time, so I took some of what he said with a grain of salt. On the way home, I remembered an exchange I’d had with an acquaintance on the topic of leaf blowers. The front yard, most of which is covered in perennials, is no more than 15 feet from the porch to the sidewalk. As I ate the leftover pizza from the previous evening’s dinner, my wife, who has a penchant for pointing out the obvious, said that I’d have raked our leaves and the leaves on the property of several neighbours in the time spent going to the store, choosing the blower, driving home and so on.Ĭhuckling, she asked if I’d forgotten the size of our lot which includes our semi-detached house. No point in tackling such a major task on an empty stomach. Wearing her familiar wry smile, my wife had been observing all this from the kitchen window.Īfter I reattached the bag, I felt hungry. The leaves being swallowed into the machine were flying out the other end. I pointed the spout at the ground and began vacuuming around my feet. And our back and front yards are magnets for the leaves that drop from several of the more than 100-year-old majestic oaks and maples that line our street.Īs per the instructions, I donned earmuffs and with an enormous sense of anticipation, I pushed the switch and the motor roared into life. There’s a large mulberry hanging over our fence on one side and a bigger silver birch tree on the other. I headed to the backyard, where I stood ankle-deep in leaves, not all of which had fallen from our Japanese maple, crimson hawthorn and silk lilac. The instructions were complicated, but I persevered and after two hours, I had the vacuum feature ready. When I opened the box, I felt like a kid at Christmas. “Besides,” I said to my wife, “spending time raking and bagging leaves eats into my golf practice time.” I have a keen distaste for doing things by myself. “They’re two very different activities,” I explained, “one solitary, the other social.”
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