Wishing For a Snow Storm

Fall is my favorite season. But there is one little itty bitty thing I hate about it: leaves. Not the pretty leaves in the trees but the ugly ones on the ground. The ones that have be to be raked up. You would think that when we moved out the part of the country where property is measured in acres and not square feet, we would have invested in some good yard equipment. Sad to say, the only yard tool that got upgraded was the pushmower. So yes, we have to rake all that land with all those leaves by hand. Ugh. Last year, though, we got lucky. Just before we were set to go raking, we had a huge wind storm that blew most of the leaves out into the fields. Then it snowed. This year we weren’t so fortunate.

This afternoon my mom and I raked leaves. By no means did we actually do the entire lawn. Are you crazy? That’d be a two--perhaps three day job. Nah, we did the area along the house.

Both of our neighbors have leaf collector attachments for the riding mowers. Dusty’s stepfather was out there at the same time we were. It’s kind of embarrassing slowly raking leaves while your neighbor is zipping along. It’s even more embarrassing knowing that you aren’t going to clean up your entire lawn and realizing that those leaves left on our property are eventually going to blow onto his. And it gets worse when you know that he knows that. And then you want to crawl into a hole when he starts doing some of your yard adjacent to his. In this photo you can see where the property line is (yellow) and how much of our leaves he sucked up.

Yeah, I’m wishing for a snow storm to hit us right about now.