This is a hard time of year for too many people.   Frequently, our neighbors who have been on the margins, whether financially, medically or psychologically experience a turn for the worse around the holidays.  While these days should be ones of health, hope and happiness, too often it means the opposite for some.  While we all look for ways to help throughout the year, the holiday season makes us feel we want to do more somehow.  With all the demands on our time and our wallets, we can sometimes feel stressed or resentful when someone asks us for more.  So here are a few things we can all do while enjoying a favorite hobby, gardening.

1.  Bring your brightest, freshest flowers to the local hospital.  Did you know that research has shown that having fresh flowers in a hospital room can help patients need less pain medication, have lower blood pressure and make them feel less fatigued?  There are too many patients that are without this simple pleasure.  The nurses on any floor can help you find someone in need of a little green cheer.  Not only will the fresh flowers help, it will also help to know someone cares.  Make those blooms count!  We promise that the person you give them to will appreciate them and think them more beautiful than you can imagine.

2. Give your extra produce to a local food bank.  This can be done on a personal level (we all have extra potatoes, zucchini, squash, onions or herbs that we don’t need) or you can organize an indoor Plant  A Row for the Hungry drive to supply food banks with fresh produce over the lean winter months.  You can find info on the Plant A Row program at The Garden Writers Association.   It’s very difficult for food banks to afford fresh produce in winter months, leaving many people to go without.  With just a little extra effort, our neighbors could be enjoying healthy fruits and vegetables year round.

3.   Visit a  local assisted living center or nursing home with potted plant cuttings from your houseplants.  Not only will these plants have the same pain ameliorating and emotion boosting effects as flowers in a hospital room would have, but research has shown the longer a person has the opportunity to care for a living thing, be it plant or pet, the better they fight off depression and anxiety.  Residents with potted plants or pets not only live longer, but have a better quality of life and are more active than residents who do not have this.  Make sure to make the pot small, so that if space is limited the resident can keep it without making their room uncomfortable.  You can always come back for a nice visit to check on how the resident and your plant are doing and bring a bigger pot!  It will give you something in common to talk about and you will make someone’s day so much brighter!

4.   Collect seeds from your plants and donate them and your time to a community garden.  Many urban and suburban communities are recognizing and honoring the value of green spaces.  Chances are, there is an underfunded, undermanned community garden near you.  Not only do these gardens usually need supplies, they also need people that know how to garden and most especially, know how to teach others to garden.  You don’t have to be a master horiculturalist.  If all you know is how to grow potatoes or roses or even just how to prepare soil, your knowledge is important.  Go spend half an hour a week weeding or teaching.  You will be pleasantly surprised by how enthusiastic the participants are and your gift of both seeds and knowledge could hardly go to a more worthy endeavor.

5.  Go and care for a sick neighbors plants.  Winter or spring, plants need care.  Some of our neighbors just can’t get around their home or garden easily this year and might need a little help trimming, watering or just shoveling snow to get to their greenhouse.  There is nothing so crushing to an avid gardener than to see their work wither away or spill over with choking weeds.  Not only will your neighbor be much more cheerful with a tidy, healthy space, your whole neighborhood will appreciate it (and hopefully pitch in!).

These are just a few ideas that will cost you little to nothing in both money and time but will result in an astonishing amount of happiness for a few people that really need it right now.  Can you think of some other ideas from the garden that could help?  Do you have a charity that could use a gardener’s assistance?  Send us a note so we can share!

So what does the other side of the ritual coin hold?  Our other illustrious thinkers, Rudolph Steiner, Jean Jacques Rousseau and Karl Marx represent the other line of thought about scarcity and its effects on society.  This line of thinking embraces biointensive gardening, new agricultural technology and more efficient land and water use.  The belief is that while society is ever growing and needs are therefor ever growing, technology, human innovation and finely honed growing techniques will always keep up with demand.  The world’s pie is ever growing, and when one part of the world does better, the whole world will see an increase in their quality of life.

So what does this mean for our sacrifice and harvest rituals?  It is not that redistribution no longer happens at each of these rituals, it definitely does, those living on the margins still take what they need, but the reasoning behind each ritual changes with this view point.

The Fields of the Gods

All this new technology, this intrepid innovation is not free.  Creating food, growing ones one sustenance is a godlike act.  If we think of what domesticating herds and plants really entails, what it really is, we realize that agriculture is really about harnessing natural forces: water, light, even the very rock and soil of the earth.  It really is the province of the divine in many, many cultures around the world.  A gift of the power to farm successfully is very great indeed, and requires thanks of some sort.  The ritual sacrifice in this view is not to thank the gods for granting a bountiful harvest, but to thank them for giving the power to create that harvest into human hands.  For Steiner, this means harnessing the power of the stars, for modern desert farmers, it may mean controlling water through irrigation, for more ancient groups, controlling the rains through ceremony.  Regardless, it is in the hands of men that responsibility lies when herds thrive . . . or when harvests fail.  Ritual sacrifice is an acknowledgement that this power is temporary, it may be removed at any time if the gods are unhappy (it is not so much that gods smite the fields as make men impotent to save their crops).

Bragging Rights

And what of harvest celebrations?  Even under this line of thought, harvest celebrations are about redistribution, of equalizing the goods so that everyone has what they need to survive.  Except under this view, the one of the pie growing ever bigger for everyone, harvest celebrations are also about status.  Without the ability to have a hoard of goods to prove one is the big man, how can status work in a redistributive society?  If one thinks of the great Potlatches of northwestern native tribes, you can have some idea.  Harvest celebrations also honor the best hunters, the best growers, the best craftsmen.  Instead of honoring them with the most material possessions, it gives these “big men” the chance to gain status through the distribution process.  They have a chance to say, yes, we are all better off this year, and it is because of my efforts.  While this may not mean much as far as how many goods these people have, it does affect things like their voice in society politics, their mating choices, perhaps even their position within the societal religion.

Thus ends the biodynamics rant!  I hope it’s been useful, I know I have learned a lot about our current farming practices from studying rituals of other times and cultures.  It has definitely made me question my own reasons for honoring old wives tales and planting techniques.  Can you think of strange or mysterious rituals we use today in every day gardening?

The last segment of this series on agriculture and ritual (wow, all from a tweet on biodynamics!), will focus on ritual sacrifice and on harvest celebrations.  What has one got to do with the other?  We shall have to ask our opposing economists, philosophers and scientists about that.  Although it’s not quite fair to boil down these six remarkable minds to a few viewpoints, it is useful to think about their driving thoughts and how universal these basic positions are. 

“Carry a Big Stick”

For Thomas Hobbes, Charles Darwin and Thomas Malthus, the world, both natural and human, is a place full of conflict and scarcity.  Once we have filled up our space with people and farms and cities, there isn’t anymore.  We cannot hope to keep up with the sustenance needs of a huge worldwide population, no matter what technological innovation we achieve.  For an individual to get more (food, space, land, any material good) he must forcibly take it from someone else.  If someone somewhere gains, then it follows that someone somewhere else is suffering.

The purpose of the rituals of both sacrifice and harvest for folks who take this line of thought, is redistribution.  In order to keep the peace, society has to ensure that the status quo is not so uneven that it sparks rebellion or revolution.  In fact, human society’s entire function is to regulate the “unfairness” to tolerable levels so that civilization doesn’t fall apart and lead to the nightmare of Hobbes’s natural man. 

How does the ritual of sacrifice to the divine do this?  (By the way, we are speaking of sacrifices of food products, i.e. vegetables, herd animals, game, or baked goods, a study of human sacrifice is another topic entirely- well, sort of)  The ritual of sacrifice usually involves giving either

a.) the first fruits of a growing season or birthing season (if we are talking about herds) or

b.) the best of the harvest (beast or plant)

as thanks for a healthy, abundant harvest.  What actually happens to these offerings?  Some, it’s true, are burnt entirely, but surprisingly, the vast majority is not destroyed, but left either for the priestly class to offer or to consume as payment for their divine services, or is left at the altar of the deity. 

Who eats Santa’s cookies?

Both of these methods are an indirect effort at redistribution.  For the priestly class, some may depend solely upon these offerings for their subsistence.   The offerings may have changed over the centuries and between cultures, but many religions still take tithes to pay for their priestly class (or collection plates in services) so this should not be a terribly foreign concept to the modern world.  The other form of redistribution comes from those offerings that are left on the altar.  In many cultures, these offerings are allowed to rest overnight or for a few days before they are given to those on the outermost margins of society.  The elderly or infirm who cannot work the fields themselves may partake of the offerings after a set time.  Even where this is not an acknowledged right, where beliefs are strong that the gods will consume the offering, the underprivileged may take the offerings in secret with the tacit acceptance of the society.  The same sort of activity occurs, even today, in the gleaning of fields.  It is taboo in many cultures not to leave some gleanings in the fields, whether for divine consumption or charitable consumption.  While, yes, some animals may partake of the gleanings, many times it is those on the edge of the community, who most need the food that glean the fields.

The Original Potluck

What about the harvest festival?  Again, this is a redistribution of wealth.  Gifts of food, clothing, even trade goods are a common theme during harvest festivals throughout the world.  Society steps in to ensure that the strongest or even those who worked hardest do not reap all the profit from the harvest, but that even those who could not contribute to manual labour will survive.  Without these harvest festivals what has happened throughout history?  Bloody conflict as in the French Revolution, modern food riots and panics, and great famines. 

According to this cheery line of thought, the dwindling of redistributive rituals such as the harvest sacrifice or festival, is responsible for much of today’s ills.  Without an institutionalized version of these processes we are all headed for revolution and tyrannic rule.  But what do their opponents think?  We’ll discuss the brighter side of harvest ritual in our next post.

Which side would you fall on?  Weigh in and let us know!

It’s easy to convince ourselves that rituals surrounding agriculture are outdated, simplistic or rudimentary and are of no use in the modern world.  But the truth is, many of these rituals have excellent reasoning behind them, and understanding this reasoning, whether we retain the ritual or not, can teach us many forgotten techniques for land management.

The Buddy System

Take, for example, the practice of companion planting.  Companion planting is a method of agriculture that uses crop pairs to do one or more things: keep the soil from becoming depleted, attract mutually beneficial insects or birds, and make maximum use of limited soil space.  It is manufactured symbiosis and many people choose to practice this method of agriculture today, rather than spraying pesticides or using fertilizer.  The classic example, of course is the sacred trinity of the Three Sisters: maize, beans and squash.  Not only did this set of companion plants thrive in small milpa gardens without rapidly depleting the soil because of the nutrients they recycle, they also provide the entire basis for subsistence.  When prepared together, these three crops provide all the nutrients a human needs in their diet.  These three crops appear together throughout the Americas, and the spirit of each in rituals, always appears with the other two.  The other companion plant most used throughout the world is of course, yarrow.  Attracting predators of pest insects and replacing soil nutrients, yarrow continues to be a valuable plant to have in the garden.  In the past it’s been said to ward off everything from vampires to illness and was a staple in the English medicinal gardens for centuries.

Those darn squirrels

Speaking of pests, many farming rituals are focused on prohibiting evil spirits, displeased gods, or supernatural thieves from entering the garden.  But what do these rituals actually do?  In Sri Lanka, rice paddys usually aren’t fully harvested, a strip of cultivated paddy on the edge of the field is left for the birds.  While this taboo on full harvesting may seem wasteful or foolish, it actually helps these farmers immensely.  Birds are attracted to the unharvested rice, and while they are eating the grains, they also pick off harmful insects from the entire paddy, something that would take an army of humans to do. 

The development of windchimes in Asia also has a similar effect.  Originally, lightweight chimes were hung in fields to let farmers know which direction the wind (and therefore, the rain clouds) was blowing and to discourage evil spirits both from entering the field and the temples where chimes were hung.  The chimes definitely scared off evil doers- the random, often loud sounds they make frighten rodents, raccoons, rabbits, even deer away from vulnerable garden crops.  Windchimes continue to be used to discourage pests today.

The chiming trellis from www.thetrellisstore.com will keep those squirrells out of your grapes and beans

Lucky Stars

Farming taboos also have uses beyond superstition and social regulation.  Many cultures have strict rules on when and where crops can be planted.  Some cultures make use of astronomy, depending on certain star positions to be visible before planting and harvesting can take place.  Some rely on the reappearance of birds or hibernating beasts to regulate their growing season- something we haven’t entirely done away with today (think of Groundhog day or the first robin of spring).  In the absence of a written calendar (which frankly, is also based on astronomy), these are reliable signs that the ground is ready to be cultivated.  Taboos on early or late planting and harvest in the form of being performed within a timeframe of a particular ritual, ensured the best chance of survival for communally grown crops and the society growing them. 

Everyone needs a vacation

Another taboo common to most cultures is which pieces of land may be used in a certain year.  Dozens of fertility rituals are performed every year on specific fields, these are the only fields allowed to be planted.  This has the important effect of allowing some areas to lie fallow, to prevent the earth from being depleted.  These taboos are not confined to any one culture, most agricultural communities around the world know the value of them, there are even rules about how much to harvest and when to leave fields fallow in the old testament.  With growing populations, especially in urban areas of the world, fallow field simply are no longer an option, so fertilizers are used instead.  But what does this constant use do? 

Salted earth (picture courtesy of www.fao.org)

No fallow period means farmers need to use ever increasing amounts of nitrate rich fertilizer to keep their crops growing, as the fertilizer washes into the ground water and the natural salts of rocks within the soil dissolve, land further down the water shed becomes unusable.  Salting the earth of one’s enemies was considered the oldest form of genocide, because it rendered the land completely useless for food production and was the equivalent of a death sentence even in ancient times.  Today, we do it to ourselves by not observing fallow periods.  How’s that for a useful taboo?

Finally, of course, there are the ritual sacrifices and harvest rituals which we will discuss next time.

If it’s Darwin, Hobbes and Malthus vs. Steiner, Rousseau and Marx, what sport are we playing again?

        

 

Vs.

 

 

    

"Synchronised swimming" "I hope it's rugby too"   "Three legged races"

 

Actually, it’s gardening. I was reading some tweets today on biodynamic methods of planting tomatoes. I wondered, what on earth is biodynamism and what has it got to do with my fruits? So I went and looked it up. Turns out, biodynamics is a method of agriculture that not only sees any farm animals (i.e. cattle) and plants (i.e. my tomatoes) as living organisms, but the entire farm, soil, air, water all as one contained living organism. Not so strange considering what we’re learning about the effects that the fertilizers, pesticides and antibiotics we use to encourage our plants and animals have on our soil, water and air. It seemed pretty straightforward, akin to the organic farming. But then, I read a little more and found it stemmed from a spiritual philosophy called anthroposophy- which links the energy of the cosmos to the soil in our yard. Since I was reading about all this online, I also was subjected to the standard “You guys are crockpots” comments on each article. It made me start thinking about how many hundreds of religious rituals are attached to agriculture and how useful, in a practical sense, that these rituals are.

We all know how religion affects agriculture, chiefly in land use rules, armed conflict over arable land and access to the products of that land. But it’s not often we get to consider how agriculture affects religious practice. Gardening really is the stuff of life, its products meant to sustain us in this life, and in some cultures, into our afterlife as well. Almost every culture, including our own, have strange and sometimes mystifying preparations and practices when it comes to growing food and medicine. Many of these practices have been reduced in status to old wives tales or superstition in today’s modern society, but many of these practices had (and still have) good reasons for being used. For example, most preplanting rituals around the world involve mimicing the actual actions one would take throughout the growing season for a particular crop or the songs and stories told during this time contain casual farming advice and tips.

Practical Lessons

These rituals are a valuable teaching tool for new growers, so that no seed or piece of land goes to waste. They are generations of memorized farming methods and instructions handed down with the benefit of real experience behind them. The ritual of planting governs the whole of the growing season, setting up rules on when and what to plant, creating clear divisions of labour, and establishing who has rights and responsibility for a particular plot of land. Today, instead of easily recited ritual and generations of first hand experience, we use books and property lines, calendars and seed packet information to keep track of our crops (as a result, some of us end up wrapping our potatoes in wax paper).

Who gets the biggest slice?

You may be asking yourself why I headed off this post with those great modern shamans of science, economics and philosophy rather than a visual representation of the cosmic calendar, fertility ritual or harvest sacrifice. It is because their opposing viewpoints on scarcity, especially as it relates to food and food production, is almost a universal theme throughout the world. Religious ritual pertaining to agriculture is heavily influenced by the idea that crops are either an endless gift from the earth or that land and resources are dwindling in the face of impossible population levels. That either the proverbial pie will always grow, and we will all get more as a result of it or that it is fixed and to get any extra we will have to conquer, steal or beg for someone else’s piece. These may seem like mutually exclusive ideas, but in the complex world of spirituality, they sometimes exist side by side.

Consider that sustenance is a universal need and the religious side of it is not so difficult to see, nor is it so easily laughed away. Being able to see the good common sense behind farming rituals will not only explain strange and often frightening customs, it will help us to become better gardeners. So, in tommorrow’s post we’ll discuss what astronomy has to do with planting, what ritually determined crop variety has to do with sustainable agriculture and what harvest and tilling sacrifices have to do with the redistribution of wealth and power.

Like many Americans this week, I’ve been thinking about the history of Thanksgiving.  But not the feast part of the story, instead, I was thinking specifically of the gardening part of the story.   No matter whose version of history you choose to believe, the act of teaching someone how to produce their own food is about the most valuable gift that can be given.

We think we are in an era of unprecedented technology, where knowledge is worth more than anything else we can have access to.  But this week, as I think of that humble crop that kept the settlers going, of the knowledge it took, the generations of experimentation and risk to create what we know as corn, and of the effect that just this one crop has had on the entire world, I can’t help but think that the technology and knowledge passed between peoples almost 10,000 years ago is as impressive, or more so, than what we have in the computer age.

Genetically modified crops are older than you think

From Teosinte, smaller than a human pinky and containing barely enough grain to be worth gathering, our ancestors, over thousands of years of selective breeding led to modern day corn.  It’s one of the oldest genetically engineered crops in the world.  Its a long story, how a crop becomes domesticated, but it starts slow: a community eats the sweetest, fattest, most tasty fruits of a plant and plants the seeds (either purposely in gardens or fields or opportunistically in middens or other waste piles) so that the best of the crop has a better chance to grow than the weaker plants.  At first this may be unintentional, but at some point, humans start to notice and plan, being ever more picky about which plants they will take seeds from.  Big deal, you might say, how hard is it to pick the best ones and replant them?  But it took thousands of years and many, many trades of knowledge and seeds to get to the settlers on Thanksgiving Day.

Give it to Mikey.  He’ll eat anything.

You also might consider originally poisonous species, such as almonds.  Wild almonds are fatal if consumed, carrying tannins that make them bitter and dangerous.  Yet we have domestic, safe, sweet almonds today.  How did it happen?  Someone, somewhere had to experiment and slowly breed the less poisonous seeds, every generation of trees having fewer and fewer tannins in them until today.  In this case, not only did it take thousands of years, it most probably took several lives to create the crop we enjoy now.

Consider then, the many lifetimes worth of knowledge that gets traded when gardeners exchange simple tips, a packet of seeds, a plant clipping.  If you tried to do that with anything else, with secret family recipes, manufacturing processes, new bits of technology people would think you were crazy if you didn’t get any monetary gain from it.

No matter which version of the pilgrim’s story you read, no matter where you stand on the morality of the interactions between indigenous people and English settlers, the natives who taught the pilgrims how to plant corn and survive that winter so long ago, did it primarily out of kindness.

Late one night on NPR I heard an interview with a songwriter who was talking about love (I wish I could remember who it was, if anyone knows, shoot me a note!) and he said, “Deep down, we all know we don’t deserve love, not one of us.  But then someone comes along and gives it to us anyway.”

Seeds of Love

Gardening is a lot like love.  There is nothing you can give back that will be equal in value to the millenia of sweat and heartache and hard living that went into that tiny seed in your palm.  It lies there cool and silent, not asking anything because it knows you haven’t got anything close to it’s actual value.  And if you’re lucky it grows anyway.  Teaching someone to plant or fish or hunt or otherwise provide for themselves will always be an act of pure charity from the kindest part of the heart.  It means that whoever you just taught will be equal to you in the most basic human way.  When you’ve been given that piece of knowledge or seed or clipping the only way to pay it back is to pass it on.  Don’t be stingy with your gardening advice, don’t hold back that great planting technique.  Not only did it take thousands of miles and lives to get to you, you never know how the next person will improve it, what the next generation will do with it.

So, for all the gardeners I’ve ever gotten advice from, all the kind farming souls who’ve passed down those little shards of love I plant every year in my garden, that feed my family and my friends- I say thank you from the bottom of my heart.  Happy Thanksgiving everybody.  Don’t forget to pass it on.

Go here to donate a cup of food to the hungry. It costs nothing but a few short seconds.

There is something beautiful and soft about a meadow with knee deep grass and wildflowers- at least to me, something natural that not even the best gardener or landscaper can truly replicate.  But my dad likes short grass, he even makes good points about it.  It’s tidier, it doesn’t grow into a rough mix of hay and straw and grass, and above all, it doesn’t let ticks hide in it. 

He always thought I didn’t want to mow the field because I was lazy.  But I secretly love mowing the lawn (it’s the whole power tool thing- we’ve been over my issues with god-like abilities on yard and garden), it’s very relaxing to me, as long as no one’s left their shoes in the way and I don’t run over a hornet’s nest.  But my dad was a man obsessed.  He was like a military barber for the lawn.  I swear he challenges himself to lower the blade another centimeter every time he mows, just to see if the lawn can take it.  I always knew if I let him have his way with the field, we’d be living on a dirt patch one day instead of grass.  So we battled for years, reaching uneasy compromises on the field, wherein half of it got mowed to the quick and the other half straggled into straw and weed where my dad had run out of time to mow it and I (and my siblings) refused, “ran out of gas” or became mysteriously and suddenly occupied with other yardwork when it was time to mow that half.

So why am I telling you all of this?  I know it seems like I’m going to draw a big parallel between my father’s ideas in other areas like politics and religion and my opposing views as a teenager, but honestly, my dad and I never fought, still never fight about anything except mowing the lawn or when to cut back the raspberry patch (same fight, different plant).  No, our landscaping arguments weren’t hints at larger conflicts in our lives, they were simply the different ways we felt about caring for our piece of the world.  Thinking about it made me think about the other gardeners I’ve known, the advice I’ve taken from so many people, and the passion each has had about their little plot. 

Why the world is filled with zucchini

Reading anthropology has taught me a lot about how people feel about property, why they build fences, have planting and harvest rituals, even why they fight wars over land.  But I think gardening and talking to other gardeners has taught me vastly more about all of these things than any anthropology course ever will.  When you talk to a gardener about their vegetables, their flowers, their trees, it’s a little like talking about their kids.  People take and give gardening advice almost as often as they take and give parenting advice.  And with about as much good will (that is, unasked for advice is always received badly, even when it’s given with the best intentions).  We trade pictures of our plants and expect the appropriate appreciation for our efforts, we trade clippings and expect others not to kill them (even if we cut the plant wrong), we trade zucchinis and expect people to smile and say thanks even if it’s the fifth zucchini they’ve received this week and they don’t know what the heck to do with a zucchini in the first place.

There’s politics in there too, not just environmental politics about what sprays we’re using either.  There are arguments about heirloom seeds and fair trade agreements on seed patenting.  There are arguments about fresh food allotments for elderly folks who can’t grow their own any more and haven’t got the funds even to pick up vegetables at the roadside farm stand.  And of course, there’s the ever popular neighbor’s tree overhang/ravaging dog/lax borrowing habits issues as well.

Do good fences really make good neighbors?

We may bicker and extend advice, but we know when we go home behind our fence or stone wall or property line, we’ll live how we want.  We’ll let the field lie or we’ll mow it into order.  Just like I know the field is probably bald as a cueball by now and my dad is in bliss.  Just like he knows my field will be rampant with flowers and straw and I’ll be happily swearing up a storm in spring trying to get the rototiller through it all.  And that would be okay.  Except that I found that tick the other day.  And I started thinking about my daughter walking in fields of long grass and came home panicked and searching for a picture of deer ticks.  And I started to wonder if my dad wasn’t right after all.   Is it age or parenting that’s changed me?  Or is it that I have my own little piece of the world to take care of now, my own field to mow or let lie?

p.s. here is a picture of a deer tick if you ever need to know

Good yard trimmings go here when they're cut. Bad yard trimmings go straight to the compost pile.

It feels like walking through a bowl of old morning cereal. Kind of looks like soggy cereal too.

unbridled leaf wrangling power

 The Zen of Leafblowing

My colleagues found the task of leafblowing boring, even onerous.  But seeing the hapless leaves scatter effortlessly before me, me who had slogged through drifts of sogging yard debris and lifted a rake until my arm ache, it made me feel like a hurricane personified, a tidy whirlwind able to clear acres in a single blow.  I was a king (er queen) among yardworkers, at least until I left that job, and more sadly still, the leafblower, behind.  Now I’m back to the trenches, slinging leaves like a commoner.  I have grand leaf powered dreams for the future.  Even gas powered ones.

The last leaves and yard debris mocks me, every gust of wind blowing down more to torture me with the earnumbing echo of my absent leafblower.  For once, I look forward to the deep snow that will hide the shame of my raking inadequacies, at least until spring.  And as we have already discussed, I’m of the spring lazy variety.