The Town Crier: Last of the leaves

Published 5:00 pm Saturday, December 14, 2024

I’m calling the “Guinness Book of World Records” people. I‘m going to let them know I have the world’s biggest pile of leaves raked by a single person in my backyard. I don’t know if there’s a cash prize involved, but the bragging rights alone should be worth something.

The Kardashians seem to have brokered fame alone into millions. I don’t see them raking leaves anymore. And let me tell you, this pile didn’t rake itself.

Winter officially starts Dec. 21, so I still have a little autumn left to get my leaves done. Because of various commitments and unforeseen events, I went a couple of years there and didn’t get the leaves up. That’s not a good idea. They say leaves will “mulch” back into nature, but that actually takes years.

The leaves, and all the other stuff that comes out of the trees during the course of a year, like those little whirly seeds and various types of nuts, pile up in certain areas, and next thing I know, I’ve got some dead patches in the yard where the grass died under the leaves that were left there seemingly forever.

It was my goal this year to do a deep cleaning of the yard and not just get this year’s leaves up, but to really get up the stuff clogged down between the grass blades and the good ole dirt. The hope is that once I’ve freed up the grass and the dirt and exposed them to the sunshine, they’ll be able to work together again to refurbish the greenery of the yard as this next summer comes along. To do that I needed a really good leaf blower to do what a rake couldn’t.

I got one of those backpack leaf blowers, that’s run by the gas/oil-mix motor. For several years I had an electric leaf blower, but the problem with that was the extension cord didn’t reach to the far end of the yard. I’d get the yard almost done and then at the end of the cord I could either go looking for that extra extension cord that I no longer remembered where I’d put or I could just switch back to the rake and finish the yard off that way.

The plug-in leaf blower was not quite as strong as I would have liked either. Another issue I had with it is that the dog would go after it, barking and biting at the nozzle. It was kind of funny, made the job more like playing with the dog than doing yard work, and as I came across sticks in the yard I could throw them for her to go after. It made the chore more enjoyable but took more time.

Then, a few years ago I got out the old electric leaf blower, plugged her in and she started shooting out sparks like it was the Fourth of July, and smoke billowed out of it like the back end of a diesel truck with bad plugs. There was nothing to do but throw it to the ground and unplug it.

This coincided closely with the two-year hiatus of not raking (or blowing) the yard and so was one more thing that added to the yard decline. My wife went out and bought another electric leaf blower, but it’s one of the new battery-powered ones, so it lasts just long enough to blow the leaves off the front porch, driveway and the back deck. Then it’s time to recharge. I like to recharge with a lemonade and an old monster movie on TV.

One of the Ghostbusters

Ah, but the backpack leaf blower … it’s powerful and goes anywhere in the yard I want to go. Wearing it, I feel like it makes me look like one of the Ghostbusters, and with that hand-directed nozzle pointed into the leaves, blowing them up, up and away, I feel like a Ghostbuster as well. Even the dog won’t get close to the mouth of it, barking from a couple of yards away at me as I wander the yard.

The power of it lets me deep clean the yard just like I wanted to, blowing up all the twigs, nuts and spinning helicopter seedlings as well as the two-year-old mummified leaf leftovers, pushing them in front of me as I go. I usually try and push forward on a line across the yard, building a wall of the leaves, whether I’m using a leaf blower or a rake. When the wall gets too heavy to move forward, that’s when I bring in the tarp. Then it’s rake work to load the tarp with the leaves to drag them to the pile.

As a kid we had a big yard but not many trees and they were pines and some magnolias, both evergreen types. My dad and I raked in the summer when we would rake up the grass cuttings, load them into our wheelbarrow and then take them to the small patch of woods at the back of the yard to dump them.

‘The more leaves, the more fun’

My youthful leaf-raking experience came at my aunt and uncle’s house when I would go visit my cousin. They had a big yard full of oak trees, and so plenty of fall leaves. This was out in the county so there was a ditch that ran in front of their house along the road. The goal was to rake them all into the ditch.

For a kid, raking isn’t much fun, but my aunt, taking a cue from Tom Sawyer’s reverse psychology when he convinced the other kids to whitewash the fence, built the whole activity up not as “raking leaves” but “filling up the ditch with leaves so we can jump in them.” She described the fun so well that we couldn’t rake fast enough. “Remember kids, the more leaves, the more fun.” She had us so we didn’t want to leave a single leaf behind. “Look there, you missed some. Those are going to make the pile that much better.” And we didn’t.

Those rakes were way oversized for us and back then they had the metal tines so were a lot heavier. And there weren’t work gloves in little kid sizes back then.

If you just drove by that yard and saw us working as hard as we were you’d have thought it was something out of a novel by Charles Dickens where the kids are forced to work for their gruel. In reality, it was a group of kids laughing it up as we worked toward a giant jump. When the ditch was full, it was everything we’d been promised as we leapt over and over into that rich smelling, leafy softness. We were splashing in leaves.

Fall colors

In case you’ve wondered where the fall colors come from, carotenoids and anthocyanin are the chemicals in the leaves that produce the bright colors.

The carotenoids are responsible for a lot of the yellowish and orangish colors found in living things besides the leaves, such as carrots, eggs and even canaries. The carotenoid colors are usually there in the leaf the whole time, but the green chlorophyl used by plants for photosynthesis overpowers those colors.

When the chlorophyl stops in the fall, the other colors take over. Anthocyanin is responsible for the really red-colored leaves like those found on maple trees. This chemical isn’t present the whole summer in the leaves but comes out as those trees that have it start to shut down for the winter.

Of course, one question is why do the leaves die and fall at all. Some reasons are that they won’t use so much energy in the winter-weak sun to make food and they’re better off just being dormant. Another plus for not having leaves during winter is that they won’t catch the snow when it comes, causing the tree limbs to break under all the extra weight of winter weather.

Now, back to my giant pile of leaves in the backyard. We have family in Florida and if they come for the holidays I’ve got an experience for them they won’t get in the Sunshine State. And this isn’t the first year I’ve had a leaf pile there. A few years ago I had a pile almost as big and it came a snow. I got the ladder out and got my wife to video me as I leapt from the top rung into the pile, doing a bit of a flip as I went. It was a blast, so much so that my wife had to give it a try. Between the leaves and the snow, the landing was hilariously soft.

So let’s just say this year’s record-setting leaf pile in the backyard has the potential for some serious fun later in the season. Hopefully we won’t get a windstorm that blows all the leaves into the neighbors’ yard!

Mark Hannah, a Dalton native, works in video and film production.