by Gina Hamilton
Coastal Journal editor

Down at Turning Tide Cottage, we have a bumper crop of leaves. I know this is somewhat unusual in late October in New England, but there it is.

We do not and never will own a leaf blower, which seems like a frivolous thing, as well as an environmentally insensitive thing to do. We don’t even own a snow blower, which would be far more useful. What we do own are two plastic leaf rakes, and both were taking it easy this weekend while we watched the Red Sox win the World Series. (Told you so!)

But even since then, can we be depended on to rake up leaves, pack them into paper bags, and have them hauled away to the Community Compost Pile?

I find the prospect very doubtful, somehow.

Leaf raking is a good neighborly thing to do, and ranks up there with keeping sidewalks clear of ice and snow, picking up dog poop if said dog does her business on a neighbor’s lawn, not having junk cars cluttering up the front yard, and accepting packages for one’s neighbor and actually remembering to take them over to them after they get home from work. While we are willing to do these things, leaf raking is more problematic for a number of reasons.

The first is, if other neighbors do not rake their own leaves, what ends up happening? You can have the cleanest, neatest yard on the block, but it only takes one person on the whole block to mess it up for everybody. Leaves, unlike sidewalk ice and dog poop, migrate, we have found. They obey the strange and interesting laws of fluid dynamics, and the consequences of a turning Earth. Who are we to argue with the mysteries of physical dynamics and the Coriolis force? I mean, honestly.

Perhaps all neighbors should have to get together in September ... a purely social evening, maybe ... and vote on whether or not the whole block will rake this year. Then, everyone would know and nobody would waste their time unless they were very, very motivated or very, very bored.

The second reason is that by the time all the leaves are off the trees and ready to be packaged up (and really, what is the point before then?), one of two events takes place. The first is the likely first snowfall, after which it is physically impossible to get the leaves off the ground without a fairly strong lever and fulcrum, and the second is Thanksgiving, which is a pretty consuming event at Turning Tide Cottage. If one will pardon the pun.

Even though our son and heir is off feeding the poor and underfed in California, his poor and underfed friends will eventually show up at our house for dinner. Or at least pie. And they will all want a different kind of pie or cake.

And, we usually have five or six other people for dinner, too. And often their dogs and their kids.

But I digress.

A third reason is that I am still not convinced that leaf litter isn’t eventually good for the soil. Do I hear you cry, “Cop out!”? Nay, not. I have read several knowledgeble gardening types, some of whom have shows on PBS and HGTV, who say that decomposed leaves are great for the spring soil. What do I care about the most, the late fall appearance of my garden or my spring soil? I mean, the only really important event in the winter is Christmas, and by then, the gods willing, we will have snow, covering up all those unsightly leaves, dead cars, and shrink-wrapped boats.

And after that, well, leaves are really the least of our problem. We shall have melting snow, freezing meltwater, mud, dirty, salty sand, slush, and other charming artifacts of life in the midcoast from January to April. Oh, I can hardly wait. For a midwinter vacation to somewhere warm and dry... Aruba springs to mind.

Which brings me to the fourth, and more probable reason for not raking my leaves... I just don’t wanna. I’m a lazy sod. And I can think of ... oh, about eight million things off the top of my head ... that I would rather be doing, including scrubbing out the drains.

Now, if it turns out my neighbors are the leaf-raking types, I guess I will hunt for a youngster to do the task. I have, with more hope than reason, purchased the leaf bags already.

But if my neighbors turn out instead to be the lassez-faire types, which I suspect they might be, don’t expect to see the denizens of Turning Tide Cottage out there raking leaves. Just ain’t gonna happen