With all the recent talk about Bob Dylan and his Nobel Prize in literature, you might think this post would be about him and that. Well it’s not. It’s about something that is also timely – but more of a regular occurrence rather than a groundbreaking phenomenon.
I’m talking about leaf blowing!
Argh. The sounds of suburbia.
When one neighbor’s landscaping crew finishes their autumnal symphony, a new crew a few houses away takes up the chorus.
But as much as the noise from all of the dueling jetpacks annoys me, the greater affront is the seeming lack of concern for where the blown stuff actually goes.
It’s like somehow the act of blowing the leaves, clippings and other detritus makes them disintegrate like something out of a cartoon. Poof! Gone.
In the last 24 hours I watched 2 different landscaping crews perform similar rounds of hit-and-run landscaping. They did their mowing and weed-wacking, blew the debris around a bit and then hopped in their trucks and drove off – leaving a trail of yard waste on the perimeter of the property they had just cleaned. And a whole bunch of it just wafting in the air. Eventually settling back down into the lawn where it will await its next interaction with the leaf blower. And the process repeats.
It’s like “as long as it’s not on my property it doesn’t matter to me!”
So frustrating. And don’t even get me started on aerosol sunscreen! Although it looks like someone has beaten me to the punch on this pet-peeve of mine.
You can take the girl out of Jersey 