No, it's not a music post.
We have four white birch in our yard. They look nice and gold for a bit in the fall, and set off our house nice. Then the leaves come down. Like as not it's too rainy, or windy, or both, to clean them up for the next few days. Then the leaves come off of the neighbor's two big maples. A major share of them land all over our yard. God doesn't even want to know how many of those leaves there are. One thing in this world that I don't dare do anymore is rake leaves; I haven't had any real trouble with my back for a long time, but I'm not about to do lots and lots of raking leaves. So I bought a leaf blower a couple of years ago. It works fine up to a point; then you just get a mound so big the blower won't move it any more. There are so blasted many of the things, I would be until Christmas putting them into bags to get them out back where I pen them in wire to burn them. I've got an old pitchfork, and I tried moving the pile along with that, but it was still taking a long time; in the meantime, I was getting little gusts of wind working against me, and wondering when the wind would come up and cost me all the progress I'd made. Finally I had a small stroke of genius. I started doing something I'd never seen or heard of before, but which is so simple that millions of people must have done it. I worked up a pile with the blower, and then walked along, legs apart aways, dragging my feet, and just shoved a mess of the pile by walking. It only worked so much at at time, and then I had to bring the pile up with the blower again, but I was making a lot more progress than any other way that I've tried. Finally got most of the mess rounded up. I came in as tired as I can ever remember being in my life. Had to get the things up, we've got snow threatening, and there were so many they would have totally trashed the lawn. Next year the maples will be bigger, with more leaves, and I'll be another year older. Autumn is pretty, but I'm beginning to dread it.
            Dean