The money shot is never worth it.
Ha! I’m awesome.
Maybe you thought I was done with my leaf travails after having written about oh so much poop, but that was just the back yard. The front yard was a whole different bag of poop. And by “bag of poop” I mean, no poop is involved in this one. Except for those last three sentences.
Anyway, as I’ve mentioned before, I share my front yard with my neighbors because I live in a duplex. We also share a wall so I can hear them screaming ridiculous insults at each other (”You’re lazier than a dumpster!” or “You talk too loud!”). Whenever I do anything like mow the lawn, clean up leaves, or burn a giant pentagram in the yard, I’ll do the same for my neighbors.
So I started on the far side of my neighbor’s lawn and began blowing leaves across his lawn towards my lawn, and when I got to my lawn I’d switch the leafblower into a leafsucker/mulcher/taffy-puller and mulch up all the leaves. Simple. Thirty minutes later I have a huge pile of leaves, ready to get mulched. And I do not disappoint. I mulched the shit out of those leaves.
But when I started getting to the bottom of the pile the leafblower started making funny noises every so often. I’d hear a loud crackling sound as the leaves and small sticks would be ground up into mulch, but every now and then I’d hear a wet, slurping noise, and then the mulching chamber would be thrown off balance for a second as something weighty was spun around the chamber, and then another wet slurping noise, and then back to the regular crackling sounds.
It would happen frequently enough that I began to be able to tell when I was about to hear the wet noise, and I was finally fast enough with switching off the blower to see something white and soggy roll out of the end of the vacuum tube. I wasn’t really interested in taking a closer look, but I leaned over anyway and was surprised to see what looked like two pieces of old bread that looked like they’d been sitting on the lawn for a while before being blown across the lawn with a bunch of leaves and then partially sucked up in the leaf-blower. And then it suddenly all clicked.
My neighbors throw stale bread out for the birds every day. I don’t know if this is a Baltimore thing, or a middle-class/lower-middle class thing, or what, but my family is guilty of this too. From time to time we’d have a piece or two of bread go stale so we’d break it up into little pieces and throw it into the yard for the birds. Not my neighbors. They throw whole pieces of bread into the yard. Daily. Sometimes there’s six or seven pieces stuck together. I’m not exactly sure where all the bread comes from, but I sure as hell knew I had already sucked up at least half a loaf, and by the time I was done I was pretty sure that the bag of my leaf vacuum contained a tiny replication of hell for people who hate leaves and stale bread.
Which brings me to the final part of this unnecessarily long story: leaf removal. The one drawback to my leafblower/sucker device is that emptying the mulching bag is a goddamned pain in my ass. The mouth of the mulching bag is unnecessarily small, so it’s really difficult to pour leaves out of the mulching bag and into a trash bag. So instead I just laid a 10×12 foot tarp on the ground and dumped all the leaves on to it. It was much easier and faster to do it that way, but leaf disposal presented a new problem. I wasn’t going to throw away my good tarp, and I had to get rid of the leaves.
So I grabbed some string and bundled up the tarp. As a bundle the leaves were heavy and cumbersome, but with a minor amount of trouble I was able to sort of lift/drag them to the waiting trunk of the car. As I left the fenced-in back yard I was met eye-to-eye with my neighbor on the other side of my house. I heaved the leaves off the ground and into the trunk of the car. I’m not sure if she doesn’t speak English, or if she just doesn’t talk to me, but she took one look at the body-sized bundle I was dragging from behind my house and stuffing into my trunk and she turned around, put her head down, and probably tried to mentally erase me out of existence.
I was only able to get the bundle halfway into the trunk, which was good enough since I was just driving it to the dumpster about 100 feet down the street. But there were a surprising number of neighbors out that day, and I could see their eyes following the man-shaped body-bag in the back of the car. They all watched as I hefted the leaves halfway into the dumpster and then eventually undid the string so that all the leaves spilled in, but I think some of them are still pretty skeeved out by the whole affair.
If only they had also known about the bread and the poo. (Nuts! I did it again! Crap! I mean darn! Sorry.)
