It’s like awakening with a hangover from a monthlong party celebrated with tons of colored confetti. When leaves have dropped and leaf peeping tourists are gone, that’s autumn in New England for many of us living here. Time for leaf cleanup.
We’re world famous for October color. It might as well be a sunset caught for weeks like a kite in the trees. It’s a regional icon essential to our identity and economy. New Englanders delight in flaming sugar maples, lemony birches, and late blushing coppery oaks. The vibrancy of the year’s colors is a subject for discussion on street corners, in supermarkets, and around dinner tables. The effects of rain or drought, the previous year’s snowfall, hours of sunlight, and an early or late frost are among variables providing almost as much partisan passion as politics.
Bright autumnal tints elevate the spirit, put us in touch with natural cycles, and are kaleidoscopically beautiful. But as much as we delight in color, for many of us it’s not the main event as measured in time and energy—at least if you have a lawn and garden. As the season’s more evocative name suggests, it’s the fall of leaves and their cleanup that provides the most immediate connection between people and nature.
I find the gentle, sometimes swirling, easy float of leaves to the ground fascinating. Every year I spend hours watching them drop from the sugar maple outside my window. How soothing to see them drift down without benefit of a breeze. They are almost suspended in the air, soundless, gently rocking like tiny golden boats on water. Each one loosened from a branch is like the ticking of a seasonal clock. Then suddenly, responding to the slightest breeze, there’s a whirling cascade falling with the intensity a summer cloudburst. Afterward, not a single leaf will fall for the remainder of the day. Signaling a changing year, I watch with a mixture of sadness and delight as one season is exchanged for another.
Of course, leaves falling means leaf cleanup. It can be an arduous task rivaling snow removal for the least liked necessity of yardwork. Often it involves raking, blowing, tarping, lugging, and carrying them away. And while I like watching leaves fall, to my annoyance it always seems that the wind lands the lion’s share in my yard. I know my neighbors feel the same.
Yet, it’s not all drudgery and backache because the effort brings a satisfying link to something larger than myself. It’s a kind of sacrament, a feeling of partnership in nature’s routines. Participation “in Autumn’s affirmation,” twentieth century writer Hal Borland called it. “In that simple task,” he wrote, “I was affirming my belief in matters that are being challenged day after day. Particularly my belief in a tomorrow, a future.” Routines like his annual fall composting of leaves said more to him than “loud words and the big defiances” in the public realm.
The way in which we dispose of leaves has changed a great deal over the past half century, evidence of larger factors in the world around us and rising environmental consciousness. When I was a child, those who didn’t have adjacent woods to toss their leaves, raked them to the curb and burned them in slow, smoky fires. Concerns over air pollution led to bans on burning and for a period of time many leaves were dumped in landfills. With landfills reaching capacity, widescale industrial composting was implemented and leaves were forbidden in municipal trash. As Borland knew, composting not only enables us to participate in the work of the season, it produces a valuable product returned to the earth as humus, sustaining humanity with nutrients for food and fiber crops.
Live in New England long enough and leaf cleanup becomes an epic of family life, a biographical marker in the year that binds generations. Walking home from first grade in the early 1960s, I remember smoldering leaf piles along the road. They smelled vaguely sweet, slightly pungent. To me that scent remains the essence of autumn, and in memory I smell it every year though it’s been many decades since I’ve had an actual whiff. Scamp that I was, I’d sometimes kick the burning piles and dart off before being caught. It’s a wonder I didn’t start any fires—at least none that I know about.
Kicking leaf piles and jumping into them was an annual ritual of my youth, well into high school. It’s a pleasure I later shared with my own children, now full-fledged adults. There are few simpler and greater joys. You leap, cover yourself with leaves, breathe their earthy scent, and laugh with abandon. We wrestled in the piles and tossed leaves at each other like they were all we ever needed. The late Donald Hall, poet laureate of the United States, extoled the delights of leaf kicking in verse: “I kick at the leaves of maples, / reds of seventy different shades, yellow / like old paper; and poplar leaves, fragile and pale; / and elm leaves, flags of a doomed race.”
My kids and I didn’t merely kick and jump in leaves. We also collected colors and shapes, turned them into art with glue or crayons. Sometimes we ironed them between pieces of wax paper, creating our own ersatz stained glass. I did the same in grammar school.
With times passage, autumn cleanup is marked by increasingly aching muscles as I age, and changes in leaf removal technology. Where once rakes were the primary means of gathering, now there are blowers of various kinds emitting noise that ranges from the whine of giant mosquitos, to the endless roar of motorcycles.
I still use a rake in some places, but a blower is easier on my back, if not my muff protected ears. Still, I sometimes miss the regular rhythm of the rake and its gentle scratching sound. Some people still bag their leaves for pick up, others employ elephantine vacuum trucks with giant hoses like pachyderm trunks. For years, I loaded my leaves in a pickup bed and carried them to a local farm where they were used as compost on lettuce, carrots, cucumbers and other vegetables I’d buy in season. In this small way, I tied fall labor to spring and summer meals. These days, a young landscaper gathers my leaves from the curb where I’ve blown and raked them.
With all the uncertainties in the world, there’s something comforting in knowing that come autumn, leaves will fall and a familiar task beckon. Trees shake off the trappings of summer and so do I. There’s a lot more than color to this deciduous bedtime. There’s a lot more than hard work to cleaning up.
