Leaves

This week we have been at war with the live oak leaves all over this place. We have been literally buried in leaves. As everyone in this part of Texas knows, our native live oak trees shed their old leaves in the Spring. Close on the heels of the beginning of the shed, comes the pollen strings. For people, like me, who have an allergy to live oak, these pollen strings are a thing to dread. The air turns yellow. The trees turn yellow. The pollen is sticky and falls on anything that's outside and has the misfortune to be located beneath a pollinating tree. Only one of our vehicles -- mine -- fits inside the garage, so during this period, my SO is constantly washing pollen off of his Suburban or his Silverado. The lawn furniture also gets one of its infrequent washing. The skylights on the roof become opaque with the stuff.

At the end of this period -- the yellow period -- comes the falling of the used up pollen strings. They fall and get stuck in spider webs. They fall all over plants located beneath the trees. They hang on the eaves of the house and on the power lines. They litter the ground and the flower beds. And they stain everything a shit-brittle brown. They ruin your clothes if one should happen into the washing machine. They are supposed to be good fertilizer, but I have only found them a nuisance. And if they aren't picked off of flowering plants they land on, they will cause a leaf blight or bring in insects that cause it.

All the while, the trees continue to shed leaves. Every time the wind blows, the ones already on the ground shift back and forth across the driveway and the yard. They blow from the roof of the house and into the hot tub. They fill up the bird baths and the flower beds. They harbor all sorts of creepy things, too, like copperhead snakes and scorpions. We have 84 of these trees, all of them large, a hundred years old or more, and so we are absolutely awash in dead brown leaves. These leaves are hard and brittle and to compost them, they must be ground with a shredder, which we do not own. Ah, leaf season, how I do loathe thee.

A couple of weeks ago my SO started calling around to see if he could locate somebody, anybody, to come remove all these leaves. But he ran into the same problems: 1) nobody wanted to quote a price without seeing the extent of the leaf cover, 2) none of the people he talked to had a place to haul them off to or else they were going to have to get back to us on that score. We soldiered on through the leaves in a kind of zombie-like inertia for a few more days, trying to ignore the leaves as much as possible, despite all the sneezing and the tracking of them into every doorway in this house -- there are five doorways in, which translates to a lot -- a REALLY lot -- of vacuuming.

I guess we both had the same thought at the same time, because without discussion we decided all at once to tackle the leaf problem by ourselves. We bought an extension ladder. We have been needing one anyway and kept putting it off. But the leaves piled on the roof posed the biggest hazard and to get up there, we needed a sturdy ladder. With the severe drought going on in our area, piles of dried leaves on a roof are simply a fire waiting to happen. We have a gasoline powered blower, so the ladder was the last thing we needed. My SO came home with one on Tuesday.

Thursday he got on the roof. The leaves up there created a slippery situation so he went forward barefooted, throwing down his shoes one at a time. The asphalt burned his tender feet, but he said he felt he had more traction that way. I climbed partway up the ladder and handed up the blower. But before that, I moved everything, pot plants, plant stands, water bowl for the dog, out of the way of the avalanche of leaves I knew was about to rain down. I also threw a tarp over the hot tub.  It was even worse than I thought it would be, the avalanche. Leaves were fully two feet deep around the house by the end of it. Along with the leaves came pollen and pollen strings that hung on the gutters, not to mention worm poop from the infestation that plagued us a few weeks ago. I had been wise enough to wear a dust mask but I was still covered in debris. From the ground, I used a broom to sweep down the muck that hung in the gutter covers. While my SO was up there, I fed up the car wash brush attached to the end of various hoses, and he washed the four large skylights, not beautifully, but at least we can once again see stars through them at night.

Friday we spent the day loading leaves into our little dump trailer that fits behind the riding lawn mower. We took piles and piles of them out to the North Forty and dumped them out in low spots where water stands on the rare occasions that it has rained since we moved here. In a few years they will mulch themselves into dirt. It has been agonizing work but we are finally done with it, and with these leaves. For another year anyway.

Last night we took wine in the hot tub to celebrate and to soothe our sore aching shoulders and our backs. Ahhhhh, the hot tub. Now there's a wonderful investment.

Onward ....