On Raking Leaves
Dec 29th, 2007 by Micah Tillman | 6 Comments |
The grounds-keeping staff for our apartment complex are out using their modern rakes (leaf blowers) to remove all those fallen leaves from the grassy areas of our apartment complex.
(I got lost somewhere in the middle of that sentence. Sorry.)
Which makes me wonder once again, “How did things ever survive before there were humans around to take care of them?” If the leaves needed to be raked every Autumn/Winter, and yet there were no humans there to do it, did everything just blow up?
Did the first immigrants to the Americas find a vast and desolate wasteland and think, “Looks like somebody hasn’t been raking”?
I just don’t get why some humans find it so necessary to interfere in what seems to me like a natural and necessary process. Are the trees supposed to just take from the soil and give nothing back? Seems kind of rude to me.
Raking is human interference in the natural cycle of mutual exchange. It’s like an introduction of economic injustice into the relationship between tree and earth.
There. I said it. And I refuse to be a part of it.
*Laughing loudly as quietly as I can because the child is sleeping.*
I also refuse to be a part of it.
At least by my physical actions. I happily pay my association fees, which pay the guys who remove our leaves.
And you are a part of it in the same way. You just might not be as happy about it.
:-)
When immigrants first arrived in America, it wasn’t covered by lawns. Leaves kill the grass. Lawns are unnatural too, though, so you can boycott them as well. However, you should be aware that alternatives tend to be havens for insects and ticks.
My step dad once made me rake leaves on a Super Bowl Sunday. I didn’t even like football, but I was still pissed to miss the kickoff. I was lazily circling some tree when he came out and yelled at me for doing it wrong. Now I have my own yard. I don’t rake and never watch football.
My parents’ house is surrounded by trees. Every year, until I got older, my family worked together to rake and bag millions of leaves. When I hit my teens, my dad baught a leaf blower, which I was not allowed to use for fear I might brake it. Dad used it to clean to sidewalks and made me rake up everything else, generally as punishment for whatever insidious thing I had done at school that week. As a result, I hate rating leaves and refuse to do it.
On another note, Melissa thinks lawns are unnatural, too. A friend of hers lives in a pretty nice neighborhood and has no lwan Instead the area around her house looks like a forest with many trees and lots of leaves decaying on the ground. Melissa thinks this is great and that we should do something like this; however, she nags me about mowing the lawn so that it stays nice. Irony?
I think that sometimes we’re not much further along than dogs marking spots through urination. It seems like we have to mess with the natural state of things just so that we’ve made our mark… Impacted the natural state of things to demonstrate the flex of some sort of muscle.