This past two weeks have been exhausting. All because of the leaves on the lawn.

This has been an odd fall. The leaves on our big maple out front didn’t turn colour until Sunday, 1st of November and then it was overnight that the leaves changed and started to fall. By Wednesday, over half of the tree was on our lawn and Jim started fretting about them. He would stand in the window and curse every time he saw a leaf fall.

Note – we live on a side street, no one cares about the leaves. This is the first year Jim’s even noticed them.

Luckily, the fellow who mows our lawn came by and cleared away the leaves on Wednesday. But by Thursday afternoon, Jim was back at the window, complaining at how many more leaves were on the ground. To ease his mind, we raked leaves on Friday (6 bags), and again on Saturday (4 bags) and again on Monday even though there was barely a bag’s worth on the lawn. Our lawn guy was back and raked the leaves one last time for the season. The tree is now bare.

Immediately, Jim begins to fret about how we can put the leaves out for garbage/organics collection because there were so many bags.  (bags have to be separated on the curb so the truck’s claws can pick them up and we have more bags than available space in front of our house) No matter how many times we went over the strategy, he spent the last five days worrying over and over as if we hadn’t had a dozen conversations and a solid plan. Each time we agree that it’s best for me to put the bags of leaves out on the morning of the collection day, so no one decides to be an ass and set them on fire or dump them out.

Tomorrow is collection day.

Today after I ran a few errands *in the rain* I drove along our street and saw most of our paper yard waste bags, lining the front of our property waiting for tomorrow’s collection. Despite the many conversations deciding otherwise, Jim had set them out… while it was raining. Happily, they were all correctly positioned along the curb for pick up but sadly, the bags were already soaked so it wasn’t worth bringing them back into the garage.  Which means that they are likely to disintegrate when the truck’s claw try to pick them up tomorrow and we’ll have to pick up the leaves all over again.

Now he’s worrying about the bags getting too wet.

I am so glad that the trees lose there leaves only once a year.

In my heart I know that next year I will look back on this scenario as a fond memory. It makes me feel guilty for the frustration I’m currently feeling but in this moment, I’m ready to pull out my hair.

All we can do is love them.