There are all manner of romantics, young dreamy fools, songwriters and poets who will declare that they love autumn: the trees becoming skeletal, the almond-coloured leaves gently collecting in corners.
What these people have in common, of course, is that they’ve never had to clean anything up. Leaves are a curse.
Our back garden has two normal suburban-sized trees, but out on the front pavement, three large ones are leaning over our walls. As soon as there’s a turn in the weather or a gust of wind, they start shedding. And it’s not one big leaf-dump: insidiously, they seem to take turns, deciding among themselves who will be next to torture us. Or they decide to wait until it’s nice and windy and raking it up is impossible. One of our trees is now completely bare, while the other is still fully leafed. Just waiting.
Every morning, it’s impossible to predict what the garden will look like. The dog, when she hasn’t had a wee in the kitchen, likes to launch herself out of the back door and off the decking. (Which she shouldn’t do as she has a wonky leg. I’ve told her but she never listens to me). Sometimes, she’ll land on grass, but on other occasions, she’ll be completely subsumed by a small ocean of leaves. Dogs are supposed to possess a superior sense of smell and an uncanny ability to locate themselves. As well as a weak bladder and a pathological need to bark, our dog doesn’t have these skills either. She disappears into the leaves and moves about a bit. Then she starts crying until I pick her up and bring her back inside.
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But it’s not just the dog who is inconvenienced by this. We humans are under siege. Like a plague of locusts, the leaves will do anything to find a way inside the house. They somehow manage to penetrate every room, into cupboards and shoes. They are always wet.
We have all the usual equipment. An outdoor broom. A big rake. One of those leaf blower yokes that’s just a big hoover: this year, though, it’s sucking with a bit less enthusiasm and making a weird sound. It may have decided it’s had enough, and I don’t blame it. There’s only so much it can do. Because of our leaf problem, we got an additional brown bin. We fill them, but it hardly makes a difference. Plus, we have to be super careful that we don’t put the dog in the bin by accident.
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And this is just what we have to contend with inside the walls of our home. There’s no way of ascertaining what leaves come from what tree, but some of them are almost certainly travelling from our property and mounting outside on the pavement. Legally, it’s not our responsibility, and the local authority does occasionally come along and clean them up. But a tumble of rain and a pile of leaves make for treacherous conditions underneath, and Herself has this do-gooder notion that killing one of our neighbours might be poor form.
Anecdotally, we’ve heard from people who work in the Health Service Executive that at this time of the year, there is an uptick of people presenting with broken hips and/or head injuries. Thus, we have to spend a lot of time pushing the pavement leaves into our brown bins or sweeping them into the road. Last week, Herself spent a good two hours clearing the pavement just in time for a council road sweeper to arrive and take it all away. She was so delighted that she wanted to open a bottle of champagne. The following morning, the pavement was covered in leaves again.
Of course, your nature-loving types will tell you that this is the wrong attitude: that leaves are a gift. Don’t let the misinformation fool you. It’s them or us.
