In mid-December, as holiday stress reaches its peak, Philadelphia wraps up its curbside leaf collection. In my neighborhood, the period from Thanksgiving through the third weekend of the month sees a flurry of raking, blowing, and bagging, with desperate efforts to locate the brown paper lawn-and-garden bags that are the only acceptable containers for recycling leaves. (Plastic bagging sends the leaves to our overstuffed landfills.)
The end-of-autumn leaf removal is an activity that has undergone a metamorphosis as I have made the journey to midlife. As a child, I found it delightful. Equipped with a small rake, the “mini-me” of my father’s bamboo-tined model, I would zealously join him in the crisp autumn air to push the leaves together at the curb.
Seeing how great a pile could be created was part of the joy of the activity – as was jumping in the manageable ones afterward. The smells and sounds of dried leaves in the cool relief after Philadelphia’s summer made this a magical time.
During the week, the city would bring its trucks by and vacuum up the mountains of leaves along the curbs. These would be added to other organic collections to create mulch for the parks, and even to be sold for homeowners’ lawns. Oak leaves decompose slowly, insulating plants from frost and deterring weeds as they return their nutrients to the soil. They make an excellent winter-spring mulch, and they’re probably responsible for the survival of certain rose bushes in our garden over more than 50 years.
Recently, the city abandoned its mechanized pickup of leaves from the curbside. The reason given is “budgetary constraints” – presumably, maintenance and inspection for the trucks. Now each family unit travels to a local hardware store, or if necessary out to the larger, suburban Home Depot and Lowe’s, to acquire the mandatory paper bags at anywhere from $2 to $5 for a bundle of five.
Since trucks still come out for the leaves, one can’t reasonably assume that the city saves on the cost of fuel, nor much on staffing. The environmental impact of the change would seem to be negative, as all of us now have to drive to get the bags. Many don’t bother.
Perhaps the budgetary impact is in increased sales tax collection.
The giant oak on our property, likely almost 300 years old now, produced then and does today sufficient leaves to mulch a much larger territory than our yard. My family reserves about half for ourselves and clears the front of the lawn, the driveway, and the walkways to the supposed benefit of the city – and to keep the neighbors placated.
The neighbors account most for how leaf collection has changed over my lifetime. As a child, I found the people around me roughly as cognizant as my family about the benefits of mulches and the natural decomposition process of leaves. But as I grew up and older neighbors moved away, a startling phenomenon emerged: neighbors who didn’t understand trees and leaves.
I suppose it started with the very nice couple who lived next door to us in the 1990s. The two men were avid landscapers, regularly replacing plants with whatever was “in style” in gardens and tubs around the cityscape. (Hence, a year of rather ugly cabbages cultivated along the borders of the property.) Some of their additions were lovely: I am still thanking them internally for the Japanese maple that diversifies the area.
What puzzled these essential city-dwellers was the natural process of tree growth and leaf shedding. For instance: following their laudably environmental instincts, they bought Living Christmas trees that they replanted in the border between our driveways. To their alarm, the trees grew – both wide and tall. They did not remain nice little six-footers, comfortably fitting between slabs of concrete. Ultimately, these trees lasted about three years before they were cut down, twice to be replaced with a more controllable bush.
Our oak tree was the greatest source of these men’s dismay, despite having been obvious on the landscape when they moved in. The second autumn after their arrival, one of them pointed out to me with awe, “The leaves keep falling every year.” Well, yes – that is the cycle of a deciduous tree: the old brown leaves tumble down in autumn, and in spring – heralded by an admittedly annoying flood of catkins – the new leaves burst forth in all their greenery.
The sounds of autumn, too, have changed, as few seem to want to rake the leaves. My father and I and one other neighbor may be the last people on our block who neither own a leaf blower nor want one. I have used one, and though it helps in getting leaves away from the side of the house, chiefly it burns gasoline to send the leaves spinning all over the place. It also makes a tremendous and unpleasant racket, which seems to be its selling point: most of the block endeavors to use outdoor power tools at some point over the week.
Several of our neighbors do not attempt even this task themselves. They hire lawn crews, who arrive during autumn on a weekly basis to blow a few leaves around and leave their invoice on the doorstep. Neighbors with lawn crews are more likely than others to have gym memberships, which render them “too busy” to rake the leaves. Their children, if they have them, are never to be seen outdoors in autumn.
After about 10 years, the neighbors next door departed for a larger lawn. Their successors are a lovely family with great anxiety about the oak tree, and little willingness to talk about it with us. So they give us cheerful waves as they meet us in the yard, then sneak tree trimmers in when they believe we are out and hold lengthy discourses about what they wish the law would allow them to do to the oak tree, versus what they are legally allowed to do about the limbs that extend over the drive.
I watched them at it this morning with some amusement. How difficult could it be to knock on the door and ask about cutting back a few limbs?
Still, it could be worse. Across the street, a passive-aggressive battle has broken out between one neighbor who waits until the end of leaf season and another who, on a weekly basis, collects the leaves that cross their intersecting properties. She dumps the bags on his lawn – since they are, to her mind, “his leaves.”
Trees are remarkably oblivious to our concepts of territory, as are the dead leaves that fall from them and blow across the invisible markers keeping urban neighbors separate.
Raking our pile this year – admittedly, not an exercise in perfectionism – I found myself thinking that the way we handle leaves mirrors the way we handle most issues in society today. We concentrate on finding fault for occurrences beyond our control, and on doing our best to avoid attending to our own tasks.
An example of this is the “libertarian” movement that purportedly believes all should be allowed to live as they want, as long as it doesn’t hurt other people. It’s that definition of “hurt” that keeps coming into question, as it most frequently is used to describe “inconvenience.” One person’s poverty shouldn’t inconvenience another through tax dollars. One person’s health problems shouldn’t put any financial weight on unrelated individuals, even to the point where uninsured people should be left to die. One person’s house should be allowed to burn down if the owner didn’t pay the fire department membership. And of course, on a corporate level, business shouldn’t be required to ensure worker safety or decent wages.
But I have yet to meet a libertarian who doesn’t believe his or her neighbor should be “made” to clean up the leaves. If the debate issue were ever raised, “Does your neighbor have the right to let the leaves lie all over the yard, even if they drift into your yard and make that neighbor’s lawn look messy next to your neat one?” I assure you the answer would be no – as it is to allowing some of us to maintain that all people should have access to health care and decent wages. Undoubtedly, these leaves would be causing a “burden” to the Clean Lawn Movement, and so offenders should be sanctioned.
The pursuit of happiness Americans purport to believe in, like the leaves on the lawn, doesn’t take into account that one person’s happiness may not be another’s. Unfortunately, this is the general state of human affairs in the 21st century. We find that societies to whom we have “given” democracy don’t want the kind of democracy we have. We find that countries welcomed into economic unions don’t want financial restrictions, only financial benefits. We find that to enrich themselves, 1% of U.S. society will not contemplate raising the wages or hiring of 99% of the country, and will work hard to cut the “burden” of regulations on their asset building.
The activist American response, when confronted with the clear point that what we all want is “our way over someone else’s,” is to demand, “Well, what do we do about it?” But that approach rather misses the point. Human differences can be celebrated or they can be anathematized. To attempt to erase them, however, is as futile as trying to mark the leaves on the trees as “his leaves” and “her leaves,” so they can be segregated neatly at clean-up time.
Those of us who don’t really give a fig whether we have leaves on our lawn are not going to contribute to the costs of the passion of those who want every blade of grass to stand out; and those who worry about the potential of limbs to drop, or to drop their leaves onto another’s territory, are not going to find a welcome in the demand that trees be chopped down for their convenience.
Perhaps, however, we could manage not to make each other into enemies. That will require a cooperative society, one of meeting halfway, rather than the all-or-nothing approach that seems popular today.
The leaves are going to blow across the lawn. And if we don’t stop turning our pursuits into a battlefields, we can say, with the Starks of Winterfell in George R.R. Martin’s Song of Ice and Fire
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