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November
22, 2006
I Hate
Leaves
I hate
leaves.
But I haven’t always felt this way. I actually loved leaves when I was a
little lad. (Note to wannabe writers: Check out the excellent use of
alliteration in the last sentence.) But now I’m 67 years old and I don’t
love leaves any more.
Before my wife Sally and I down-sized to our present home, we lived in a
big-two story house on a smallish lot that boasted two enormous trees,
but both were pine trees, so leaves were never a problem. Now we live in
a house that has approximately 346 trees and most of them are maples.
Maple trees have beautiful leaves for about 34 minutes each autumn and
then those leaves fall off. The leaves don’t leave our maples one or two
at a time, either. They leave by the gazillions.
On Tuesday, the red and gold leaves of October make our trees something
to behold. On Wednesday, they all fall off, piling up on the ground and
leaving bare branches to scrape the sky.
This is a problem for me because raking leaves isn’t exactly my favorite
leisure-time activity. In fact, there are lots of things I’d rather do
than rake leaves. Like undergo root canal surgery, swim in a pool filled
with hungry sharks and watch an entire episode of the stupid TV show
"Entertainment Tonight".
I’ve
tried to find neighbor kids who would be willing to rake my leaves for a
fee. “How’d you like to earn a few bucks raking my yard?” I asked one of
them the other day.
“Not much,” he replied.
The
bad thing about leaves is that there is no use for them. If they were
newspapers or beer cans you could recycle them. But I think I have hit
on a solution to my dilemma.
I made a large sign and placed it on the nine-foot-high mountain of
leaves in my front yard.
The
sign says: FREE LEAVES.
I’m figuring somebody will stop any day now and take advantage of my
offer.
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This is Column # BB46.
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