Wednesday, January 7, 2009

Helping Mother Nature Along

Those of you who don't live in sunny, warm Southern California might not want to read this post today. You might hate me by the time it's over, which is truly not my intent. I'm actually gripping. It might not seem like something I should gripe about to all of you stuck in the tundra, but here goes.

When we left to visit my daughter and family in 'that other state she lives in' on the day after Christmas, the leaves on our trees still hadn't fallen off yet. They were all sorts of pretty colors, so we knew that it was imminent. It seemed really late to us though. After all, it was December 26th. I thought leaves were supposed to fall off in the fall, not the winter, but whatever. Anyway, when we arrived home our yard was COVERED in leaves. My son said that anyone who knew us would have instantly known we were gone because my husband would have NEVER allowed that many leaves to pile up. He's been known to vacuum leaves out of our landscape rocks with a shop vac, but that's another post all in itself.

A couple of days and nine large lawn bags later, hubby had the front yard cleaned up. The back yard trees don't create as many leaves, so add a couple of bags in for that and you have a good days work. Unfortunately, even after that the stupid trees weren't done. Now it January. Now it's TIME. Time to be done racking leaves. This is what the biggest tree still looked like yesterday morning. That's Hubby up in the tree after I jokingly suggested that he climb up and shake the branches to help Mother Nature along a little. After shaking:



and shaking:



and shaking :



and shaking this is what we ended up with:



And the tree still looked like this:


No amount of shaking or jumping up and down could get that tree to give up any more leaves. Somehow I think it will be time for the the new little leaves to pop out this spring and our tree will be holding on fast to last years leaves. Talk about a Hoarder.

1 comment:

Heather said...

Our yard looks like that right now too! Hopefully someone will come over tomorrow to blow all of the leaves away! Hope that you and your family had a great Christmas and New Years! See you either at church on Sunday or Weds. night!