After a week of warm days and nights, which is very strange for November where I live, I awoke this morning to see frost on everything. I imagine that will soon be snow. Again.

Anyway, my lawn is covered with leaves. And I don’t mean there are just a few, there are billions of them. We have had some windy days over the past few weeks and all the leaves on the many trees on my lawn have been constantly raining down.

I used to try to keep up with that by running the lawn mower over them every few days at this time of year, but it didn’t work. It would work for pretty much everyone that lives around me, but not here. Why? Well, I live at the end of a street with the prevailing wind always blowing from one direction. This wind carries leaves from everyone else’s lawn tumbling down the street to stop at my lawn. Why stop here? My property is bordered by a fence that separates my lawn from a public park next door. Oddly enough, in spite of many trees in the park, there are almost no leaves on the ground on the other side of the fence. The wind is a great rake.

My side of the fence has leaves a foot deep at its base. All 100 feet of the fence.

So, I discovered the very first year living here that leaf raking or mowing was almost pointless. There seems to be a natural maximum capacity for the number of leaves that won’t blow away. As in, I could get rid of the leaves on a Saturday and, if Sunday was windy, by Monday all the leaves that were there before would be replaced. And no more leaves would appear. The land slopes away from the house toward the fence, and the leaf build-up seems to stop once that fills in to level.

The aerodynamics of leaves. Yes, it’s probably not a course of study, although undoubtedly someone did a graduate thesis on it.

The fence isn’t only good for leaves. I find the windiest days to be those days when people put their garbage out to the curb. People toss boxes and newspapers and bags into their recycle bins and the wind then recycles them into leaves which it carries to my fence. So, mixed in with the leaves, I can find peoples’ credit card bills, weekly Sudoku puzzles, love letters, pizza boxes, chip bags, grocery bags, whatever. And I really have enough of my own garbage to deal with.

The best, however, was once when there was a municipal yard-waste pick-up scheduled. That ridiculous sounding thing is when they send big trucks burning hundreds of gallons of diesel around to pick up leaves for composting in their mysterious compost-land to be turned into soil they sell to prospective grow-op builders or whoever, all in order to save the environment through continual pollution and pointless activity. Anyway, one day I went out to get into the car and saw that the wind had been kind enough to not just deposit the regular weekly newspaper allowance and leaves and twigs, but also three full paper bags of leaves.

The wind can be expedient, it seems. It may also have a sense of humour.

I don’t bother to do anything with the leaves until the snow melts. Then I gather them up and toss them over my back fence, where there’s a deadfall. It’s railway property, actually, and they don’t care about leaves. Furthermore, by the end of summer, they’ve all rotted away to nothing. Admittedly, I can’t use them to plant begonias but I’ve never really wanted to do that, either.