The calendar keeps telling me that it is Fall, but my old memory brains do not believe it. I grew up in rural Western Pennsylvania where Fall was a nice bracing coolness, and the trees turned their leaves into brilliant colors. Not too many moons ago, the Blond in the house and I went north for a homecoming football game. When we left the Pittsburgh airport the trees were magnificent.
When I was growing up, I did not think much about it. The trees were just there, and besides the leaves the horse chestnut trees were dropping their nuts. These are the same nuts as people in Ohio call “buckeyes”. I guess Ohio State U. did not want to be known as the “horse chestnuts”. Personally, I think they would have had a great name. Horse chestnuts come in a prickly shell that you have to work around in order to get the nut. They probably could have made a good defensive football squad out of that name – with a little imagination.
As some of you may know that while you can’t eat the nuts (they taste terrible and are probably not too good for you), they are bright and shiny and have other uses. Kids would try to scoop them out and make pipes out of them. We also threw them at each other quite a bit. You had to hope that the other guy took them out of the prickly shell before he threw them.
We were talking about leaves before I became sidetracked. Leaves do fall right down on the ground. It was always my feeling that it was the best place for them. Some people did not concur – mostly those of the distaff persuasion. This meant that something had to be done with them! Legions of men and boys would rake them up in their yards and after some jumping into them, burn the darn things.
This went on for decades. Then it was determined by efficient health soothsayers that burning was not good for some people and the resulting air pollution bothered them tremendously. A true medical fact, so other methods of removal had to be conjured up. The conjuring fell to cities, who told the citizens that they should rake the leaves into the gutter.
They would then vacuum them out with large vacuum machines (which the manufacturers of such vacuum machines loved). They would blow the leaves into truck which took them someplace and dumped them – where they were “burned.”
OK, the last part of that sentence is not correct. They would create great piles of leaves and turn them in mulch piles. They hoped that the good citizens would come and get the mulch for their gardens, which did not happen as much as hoped. Thus, there are gigantic piles of mulched leaves all over this great country – or at least the northern part. Gathering leaves was not always as easy as I have described.
For example, in one city in New Jersey where I lived, the leaves could not in general be raked into the gutter due to the fact that the gutters were filled with cars. Most of the people in that city did not have driveways and parked their cars where the leaves were supposed to go. So they were told to put them in bags. They did, which made the makers of large vacuum machines unhappy, but it is never a perfect world. The bags were to be taken to the county landfill. However, the county landfill said “We don’t want all those big plastic bags filling up our landfills”
So the cities uttering municipal curses still picked up the bags in the truck. However, before they took the bagged leaves to a designated county site, they had to pull over and the workers had to tear open all the plastic bags and shake out the leaves. Then, they could dump the leaves. The rest of you Northerners probably didn’t realize all the heartaches your city went through to take care of you when you complained about taxes. By the way, I do not know what happened to the torn plastic bags, but who knows what future archeologists will find when they sift through old county mulch piles.
Aren’t you glad that you now live in Florida where you only have to worry about a palm seed pod landing on your head – or a coconut which happened in a southern Florida city in which we lived?
Still love the color of those northern leaves though!
Barry Evans is a Villager and writes about life in The Villages for Villages-News.com