The ugly side of autumn hit us this last week. Until then we enjoyed a gorgeous abnormally warm autumn. The colorful leaves lingered on the trees much longer than usual. But then the temperatures dropped, the leaves fell, and we got about 3 inches of snow. There’s a line of trees in our backyard that overhang the fence and when the temperature fell they dropped their leaves seemingly overnight. With the basement guys being here this last week, it getting darker so much earlier, and the several inches of snow we didn’t get around to raking the leaves this week.
But Saturday was warmer and it was apparently Official Neighborhood Leaf Raking Day. But it was also the day we had a small birthday dinner for E over at my sister’s house (ours being all torn up still from the basement repair) and so I was busy helping set it up most of the day. While I was away N and E (in the Baby Bjorn) worked on raking some leaves, but they didn’t get to the ones on the sidewalk.
On our way to Jan’s house we saw some teenage neighbor girls raking the leaves our trees had dropped over the fence onto the sidewalk. I was so embarrassed! When we came home we saw that they had piled all the leaves into a huge mound on the side of the road. I rolled our trash can out to the pile, cringing at the unearthly loud racket it made in the quiet night, and stuffed it full of leaves. But there were still at least 2 more trashcans worth left over. *Sigh* The evidence of our lax home maintenance was still there this morning. (I was kind of hoping they might have blown away in the night.)
Oh well, there goes the neighborhood!
Oh, we are SO that family right now. Your leaves are nothing compared to the unsightly mess that is our halfway redone front yard. I’m sure our oldster neighbors who have nothing much else to do than look our their front windows at our ugly yard are shaking their heads in disgust. We too missed the unofficial leaf clean up day and were pitifully trying to make up for it today (while holding Sam, of course.) We make the smoking renters next door look like good neighbors. 🙂
I’m sure your pile of leaves was just fine. And maybe those girls got to tick off some Personal Progress requirement. Look at you, providing others with opportunities to serve!