Mid-October here in Spokane and, needless to say, the leaves
(and pine needles[i]
and fruit[ii])
are falling, as they do every autumn. Well, all is well. Before continuing, I must get the
gratitude thing out of the way:[iii] I have several reasons to be grateful: 1. At
seventy, I’m still here to watch the leaves fall and hale enough to rake them up. 2. We are lucky enough to have a house with trees on our property, here on the South Hill, a famously woody neighborhood.
3. The trees keep growing, and even seem to
be thriving, during this early phase of global climate change. In the far future, in whatever forms they
evolve into, the trees will be here much longer than us.
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| Emily in the front yard, enjoying a bit of raking in a previous October. Note matching pants. |
I could summarize this little essay in one sentence: There’s
plenty of stuff to rake up, not just the leaves. Our back yard is a three-tiered jungle. The canopy, (if I may borrow a term normally used
for tropical rainforests,) is comprised of two monstrous Ponderosa pines. I don’t know how tall they are. You have to crane your neck to see the tops.[iv] To get a better view, you have to walk a
hundred yards down the street, and still look up. From ground-level, you can get a better idea by
referring to the photo of me standing next to one of their trunks. At all times of the year, but particularly on windy autumn days, they shed long pine needles. Not every year, but on a cycle that I haven’t
yet figured out, they shed as well their male reproductive “fruit,” called strobili,
and at other times, though for some reason not recently, the big, rough female
cones. My sources say the pines may live
as long as 600 years. If that is true,
the two pines lurking above our back yard have been there a long time before we whites moved in and started divvying up the "private property."
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| Measuring one of my big Pondersosa pines. Mt. ash and ivy on the side. |
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| Strobili |
The second tier is comprised of fruit trees planted by
previous owners. [v] Currently there are two cherry trees, a green
apple, a pear, two plums, and a filbert, all fighting each other for sunlight
under the pines. On the west side of the
house, facing our neighbor, I should not omit the two mountain ash trees, which
in the fall produce a very attractive display of yellow leaves and bright red
berries, a good portion of which ends up on our roof and in the gutter.[vi]
 |
| Mountain ash and human |
The first tier, down on ground level, is whatever we’ve
planted that can survive in the shade of the two tiers above: A few bushes and flowers. Starting about ten years ago, I’ve got a little
summer herb garden in pots around the patio and on the rails of the wheelchair
ramp. [vii] As mentioned before, all the detritus from
these trees needs to be raked up and disposed of in the fall and early winter,
hopefully before the snow falls and buries it.
But the star of the leaf-producing show is the big maple tree in
the front yard. I think it’s a Big Leaf
maple (Acer macrophyllum). It was a mere sapling when we moved in 25
years ago. Now it’s huge. Every year around this time it produces more
and more leaves. And more. (See photo).
One year, a young
woman walked by, stopped, ogled the leaf pile, and asked me as I was raking. “Can I have some of your leaves? My kids would love to have a big pile of
those to jump around in.”
“Well, sure. Take all you want!” said I. But she never came back to get them. Maybe she was waiting for me to offer to bag
them up and deliver to her house.
The City of
Spokane provides each residence with three waste containers: One brown one for regular garbage, one blue
one for recyclables, like paper, metal cans and approved coded plastics, and
one big green one for yard and garden waste.
(See photo.) You can put a lot of
leaves (or needles) in the bin, especially when they’re dry and you can squish
them down. But in the fall, around this
time, there is no way you can keep up with the leafage just by filling up that
bin once a week. You have to put
the rest of the stuff in bags.
Until about four
years ago, I used big black plastic bags.
When the yard waste pickup truck came on Thursday, a guy would jump out,
tear the plastic bags open from the bottom, dump the leaves in his truck, then
leave the floppy torn-open bags on the street, which were then unsuitable for
further use. Looking around the
neighborhood, I saw that some people had switched to big, brown, paper compostable
leaf bags, which you could buy at the hardware store. Now, when the pick-up guys come on Thursday, they
just throw the whole thing in the truck; leaves and paper all end up in the
same compost pile. (See below for city
composting practice.)
Every year, I
have to buy more of the paper bags because the big maple tree keeps growing and
producing more leaves. This year, I
estimate that I’ll need 15-20 bags, just for the maple leaves. That’s not counting the extra bags I’ll need
for the all the stuff in the back yard, a little later in the fall.
A few blocks from
our house there’s a street called Manito Blvd, famous locally for its autumn
foliage. (See photos). Down the middle of the Boulevard, there’s a
wide parkway densely populated by deciduous trees. (We call it The Sward.) In November, city trucks
equipped with huge vacuums come and suck up the fallen leaves. The affluent folks who live on either side of
the street, of course, have trees in their yards, too. And they’re the lucky ones; all they have to
do is push their leaves out on the street and the city will pick them up.
The Sward on
Manito Blvd. is only one of the many Spokane parks that need to be de-leafed in
the fall. Many, many, tons of leaves and
other organic material is collected and “disposed of” each year. Of course, I wonder where it all goes. More on this topic shortly.
Why Even Bother?
When I started this piece, by way of inspiration, I had in mind an essay titled “Washing Dishes to Wash the Dishes” [viii] by the Zen Buddhist monk and author Thich Nat Han.
Near the end he writes, “Washing the dishes is at the same time a means and an end. We do the dishes not only in order to have clean dishes, we also do the dishes just to do the dishes, to live fully in each moment while washing them, and to be truly in touch with life.” |
| Thich Nat Han |
Now, I have been practicing Zen, as a layman, for at least the past twenty-five years. While I do not pretend to have “attained” Thay’s [ix] intense mindfulness in every moment of everyday life, I do at least attempt to practice, when I can remember, work-as-meditation. So when I am raking leaves, I am trying to rake the leaves just to be raking the leaves. Or at least I am thinking about doing it. At any rate, I am raking the leaves, and whether or not I am thinking about it, or what I’m thinking, if anything, is relatively unimportant. So, in a sense, I am “succeeding” whether I think so or not. I get to rake the leaves and the leaves get raked. Win-win.[x]
Doing this mundane task on a cool crisp fall day, it’s easy to get your senses engaged. First, for your eyes, obviously, there is the color. Speaking only of the big maple in the front yard, not every year is the color exactly the same. [xi] In years past, we have had intense oranges and reds. This year, they are the standard yellow/golden—and bright withal.
Speaking of “golden,” it might be well at this point to trot out the obligatory reference to Robert Frost, specifically his pithy eight-liner “Nothing Gold Can Stay.”“Nature’s first green is gold,
Her hardest hue to hold.
Her early leaf’s a flower;
But only so an hour.
Then leaf subsides to leaf.
So Eden sank to grief,
So dawn goes down to day.
Nothing gold can stay.” [xii]
Admittedly, Ol’ Bob Frost had a more universal theme in mind when he dashed that one off, but still, every year when I rake, just soaking in the color, I think of the poem and ken Frost’s drift. The point of this essay, after all, is that there’s something more to raking leaves than just raking leaves.
Then there’s the smell; not much to sniff when the leaves are dry, but after a rain, yes. And this year I had a special olfactory treat. As I scraped the maple leaves out of a patch of (invasive) mint in the front yard, the strong aroma of mint was released.
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| Mint |
Simultaneously, my sense of hearing is engaged by a pleasing rustle, if the leaves are dry enough, as I tromp through the piles. There are also the ambient sounds of the neighborhood: Power tools droning, dogs barking, crows cawing, folks talking on their front porches and driveways, and kids gabbing on their way home from school. And sometimes--blessedly--just the gentle rustling against a background of silence.
Using my hands, touch is the sense most consistently engaged…but perhaps in an odd way. I prefer to work without gloves (if it’s not too cold) when I perform this chore, so I can feel the rough texture of the wooden rake handle. The end of the rake become an extension of my hands, and I can feel the tines scraping the moist grassy ground as I pull the leaves into piles. Then I feel—caress, almost-- the cool leaves (sometimes wet with rain), as I gather them up and stuff them into the bin or bags. And I especially enjoy scraping off the afore-mentioned fungi.
All right, then: That takes care of four of the five conventionally-acknowledged senses; only one remains. Ordinarily, of course, I wouldn’t bother tasting the product of my work, but just this once, only for the sake of completeness in this essay, I gave it a try.
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| Not bad; a little dry. |
********
Where Does it all Go?
My version of work-as-meditation is often interrupted by recurring and probably useless thoughts of: What happens to all this "dead" organic matter? I’d like to know. Every year, it amazes me how much stuff these trees suck out of the ground, convert it by means of photosynthesis into green and brown biomass, and then drop it back on the ground in the fall. And it’s mostly carbon; it has to go somewhere.
Folks my age can remember when people burned their leaves in old rusty barrels in their back yards, right in the city. You’d see and smell the smoke rising in the chilly air. Now, of course, you can’t burn organic waste in the city; you have to trust the city to pick it up and do what’s right with it. (See below).
Outside city limits, though, people still do their own burning, certainly here in Spokane County. [xiii]
These days, of course, we’re all concerned about excess carbon (in the form of CO2 and other greenhouse gases,) being released into the atmosphere. It made me wonder how much atmospheric carbon is released, percentage-wise, compared to the main culprits, energy production and vehicle emissions. It’s relatively low, whatever, only a tiny percentage within the 13% of “Commercial & Residential” in this pie chart from the EPA. [xiv]
Even if we do burn our leaves, the carbon emissions are very small compared to those produced by our furnaces and automobiles.
As home-owning city-dwellers, there’s not a lot we can do, what? As mentioned above, I’ve had to put my trust in the City of Spokane to do what’s right with the raked-up carbon produced on our property. Fortunately, my cursory research indicates that the city is doing the right thing. According to their website, “All green waste from your curbside green bin is sent to a commercial compost facility near Fishtrap, WA called Barr-Tech. They produce usable compost that can be purchased at local stores. Check their website to find the location closest to you.” [xv]
It seems hardly credible, seeing as how the Barr-Tech composting site is located thirty miles from Spokane. That's a long trip for the yard waste trucks to haul the stuff. Even if it’s true, depressingly, the rigs are probably emitting more CO2 (and other greenhouse gases) than they are saving by taking the leaves and needles to compost. According to the EPA website, “A typical passenger vehicle emits about 4.6 metric tons of carbon dioxide per year. This assumes the average gasoline vehicle on the road today has a fuel economy of about 22.0 miles per gallon and drives around 11,500 miles per year. Every gallon of gasoline burned creates about 8,887 grams of CO2.” And these trucks are much bigger than your “average gasoline vehicle.” This is assuming that the city trucks run on conventional gasoline engines, which I’m not sure about; that research will happen later, if ever.
Nov. 7
Finally, back to the task at hand: Raking leaves (and finishing this piece.) I’ve raked up and bagged 90% of the maple leaves from the front yard, and I’m grateful that I got it done before the snow starts falling. A lot of leaves and needles remain on the trees in the back yard, though. They won’t be finished till December, so neither will I. I’ve gone to Ace Hardware for more leaf bags, and I’ll have a full green bin to put out on the street each Thursday, at least until December, which our schedule informs us will be the last day of collection until March, 2022.
NOTES:
[i] Here in Spokane they come from the ubiquitous Ponderosa pine. Needles are long and easy to rake.
[ii] Apples, pears, plums, cherries, and grapes.
[iii] Nod to my friends in recovery. Also to friends who might suspect that I’m complaining about raking.
[iv] They may be the tallest trees in the immediate neighborhood, in which there are many tall pine trees. One spring and summer, there was a pair of hawks that nested at the very top of one of them. Over the course of the summer, the two hawks became four hawks, and in the fall, they just flew away together.
[v] We bought the place in 1996.
[vi] See photo
[vii] Built in 2008 for Emily’s brother, Les Kibler, who suffered a major stroke in March of that year. He lived with us for seven years, so the ramp was necessary to get him in and out of the house. He died in the fall of 2017, after a couple of years in a nursing home in Walla Walla. The ramp remains, and though (thankfully) it is not currently used for its original purpose, a few times it’s been used to move appliances and furniture in and out. I’ve added a crow feeder, and with the herb garden; it’s now called the Leslie C. Kibler Memorial Wheelchair Ramp, Herb Garden, and Crow Feeder. (LCKMWRHG&CF).
[viii] See excerpts from the essay at Memories from the Root Temple: Washing Dishes | Plum Village
[ix] Thay is Vietnamese for “teacher.”
[x] For a more spiritually ambitious take on leaf-raking (and other household chores) , see Do Dishes, Rake Leaves: The Wisdom of the Ancient Homemakers - Lion's Roar (lionsroar.com)
[xi] See, for example: Why Aren’t My Maple Tree Leaves Turning Red in Fall? | Perfect Plants (myperfectplants.com)
[xii] I have no way to prove this, but I speculate that most people who know this poem found it first not in the original collection The Poetry of Robert Frost (1923), but in S. E. Hinton’s youth novel The Outsiders (1967), when Ponyboy recites it to Johnny in the churchyard.
[xiii] See regulations at Burn Restrictions - Spokane Regional Clean Air Agency (spokanecleanair.org)
[xiv] Sources of Greenhouse Gas Emissions | US EPA
[xv] Composting Services - City of Spokane, Washington (spokanecity.org)
MISC. REFS:
Improve Your Soil - Bury Yard Waste (ic.org)
Outdoor Burning—Spokane
Composting Services - City of Spokane, Washington (spokanecity.org)
Composting to avoid methane production | Agriculture and Food
Carbon Cycle
The Carbon Cycle | National Geographic Society
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