I subscribe to the local news’ weather advisories. During the past year, I’ve been subjected to tons of emails about flood warnings, as well as the occasional storm warning. Today’s warning is a frost warning.
Something must be done. Who do I call? I strongly object to even the hint of frost. It’s going to get cold soon. While this is good from a lawn-mowing perspective, it only means that I’ll shiver and the leaves will require raking.
Nothing good will come from this, I’m telling you.
When the leaves start falling from our tree (yes, our tree), they don’t fall so much as plummet en masse to the pavement. As if this weren’t bad enough, the next door neighbor, affectionately know as the Crazy Lady, will have a regulation fecal hemorrhage as soon as she sees the leaves.
I haven’t seen it but I suspect that the Crazy Lady has an actual Leaf Detector. If there’s no such things as a leaf detector, she has some sort of internal Leaf Radar. She’ll be standing there, scrubbing the bathroom tile with her pneumatic polishing sander, when all of the sudden she’ll shudder, stop the sander, and will know that a leaf hit the ground.
You don’t want to be around when that happens.
After the sudden realization, she’ll be at the window with her stopwatch, tapping her foot and counting the seconds until my wife or I gets out there with a rake, leaf blower, or Sherman tank. If we don’t move fast enough, she’ll call the county. Or the police.
If, heaven forbid, one of the leaves somehow manages to miss our sidewalk and hit hers, well, you had better watch out. Within seconds after each individual leaf hits her drive, she’s out there (waaaaay out there) with a leaf blower the size of a small truck. How this eighty year old woman can lift a small truck is beyond me but it never occurred to me to ask her.
One year it became apparent to me that I hadn’t gotten around to raking leaves because I came out of the house and found one of those `Leaf Collection Tomorrow’ signs that are tied to telephone poles. Except that this sign was sitting on my steps.
Three guesses who.
I had the last laugh, though. I took the sign and put it under her windshield wiper blade. In what I consider a stroke of genius, I put it ink side down so it would leak onto the windshield. Whenever she drove, she had to look through a windshield that said LEAF COLLECTION TOMORROW on it.
We’ve been pretty good since.