That time of year

The trees here aren’t quite bare. My ornamental plum still has about a quarter of its leaves. The silver maple and the crepe myrtle are bare, my neighbor’s oak is still dropping leaves, but the Japanese maple hasn’t dropped anything.

Still, it’s that time of year: raking season.

My house is on a hill. Not ‘on top of a hill’ but on a hill.

Raking the front took just one large construction sized bag, but a good bit of finagling up or down, working from the flat on the sidewalk below and the flat(ish) in front of the house; everything else is either stairs or a falling hazard.

In the back it took three bags.

First I cleared off the three deck levels, the swale and the pond before turning my attention to the hill above me.

This is also a bit of a maneuver – there’s a flatter section but it’s narrow and has plants and trees and a wall drop down to the pond etc. So, you know. Obstacles. Hazards.

And at the top there’s about 18 inches along the fence that’s flat enough to walk on.

In between there’s one path up and an ivy-covered hill that is not walkable. It might be rollable. It’s very fall-able.

But since it is also Fall, it is full of leaves.

Or it was.

Now my back porch has three large bags of leaves on it, waiting for the yard waste pickup day for me to haul it out front.

And there’s the other bag up front under the tree, also waiting.

And there’s me, a little sore but freshly cleaned and sipping well-deserved and too-long-delayed coffee at 11am on a Saturday, feeling like it’s already been a very full day indeed.

But really, it’s just that time of the year.