My Arch Nemesis

Three years ago a man, probably filled with warm and fuzzy good intentions, moved into a cute brick ranch situated on 16 acres of land. The yard immediately surrounding said brick ranch was covered in large, old oak trees full of history…and leaves.

This man then proceeded to spend the next three years ignoring the fact that the yard was disappearing under a thick blanket of dried oak leaves and acorns.So much so that nothing was distinguishable in the entire yard: it became a blowing sea of crumbling oak leaves.

I suppose we could live in this massive sea of leaves if we wanted. Obviously the landlord doesn’t care or at least not enough to do anything about it. But you see…I don’t want to live in leaves that come up to my knees. Something must be done.

The leaves pose two problems: 1) collecting them up and 2) disposing of them.

The first is easy enough to solve by raking. A whole lot of raking. An entirely too much time dedicated to raking. Not only are there so many leaves, but the lower layers have begun to decompose which makes it extremely heavy to move around and pile up. So much raking. So very much raking.

As the piles of leaves began to emerge all over the back yard, the second problem came to light. It would takes hundreds of bags to collect them all in and many trips to the dump. I don’t have the time, patience or money to spend on hundreds of leaf bags. The next best thing is to burn them. BURN THEM ALL….AHAHAHAH!

Oh, sorry. I got carried away there for a minute.

As we raked, and raked, and raked, we began to uncover things. Things like a beautiful flag stone patio off the back porch, a flag stone path leading from the driveway to the back yard, and a brick lined fire pit dug into the ground.

Ah….a fire pit!

Once that was uncovered, we just raked the leaves into the pit and hoped it wouldn’t burn the entire place down. Of course the pit is small and the leaves are so many. After two hours of burning we only got through two piles of leaves. There were over 15 piles and that was only the back yard.

Just as I was beginning to strain the neurons in my head to come up with an answer, the sun set, the wind picked up and the rain came with it. No more raking or burning for that night.

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