I spent my childhood in a tropical country, temperature all year round fairly constant. Never really gets cold there. One major difference is in the types of tree found. Trees there drop a few leaves every day and these, in towns, tend to be swept up daily by women who consider the paths and roadways have to be kept clean. October in Britain came as a complete shock.
I thought “How could the trees in the UK be so damned untidy?”
But the leaves here are not wasted: kids of all ages wander along, kicking up the piles of dead leaves. I never had the opportunity to do this as a kid back home so yesterday was happily playing in the fallen leaves when two girls about ten years old told me to clear off. I was playing in “their” leaves.
“You are not a kid, leave our leaves alone”.
I was devastated. Anyone else think playing in leaves is fun, even without a unicycle?
Picture is Autumn in my garden. ( Thread now moved to correct forum…my apologies.)
That’s harsh. Little kids telling you to get off their leaves.
Anyways, I love playing in leaves. Being buried in them, just running through them, its great.
I find the best thing to do though, is to step on just one leave. To find that perfectly dried up dead leave, that when you step on, gives off the loudest most satisfying crunch sound. I love that crunch.
Dead leaves are great! I haven’t seen any in a while, because I’m currently living in a (sub-)tropical country. But I remember running through them and stuff. They are excellent.
On litttle girls. Don’t let them push you around. If they start telling you what to do just beep their noses to show who’s the boss. It’s pretty simple once you get the hang of it.
Property-owning little kids? Probably not. Public trees? Then the leaves are public as well. If those girls did all the work to make the piles, I’d say they can claim the leaves as “theirs” for purposes of jumping in them and otherwise playing with the pile. Go make your own pile.
I like Sacramento though. We have the third-highest amount of trees of any of the world’s major cities. Paris is #1 and I don’t know what’s #2. Our leaves are mostly still in the trees at this point, but they’re changing color.
Kids come in all sizes, and ages. You should have seen the size of some of the “kids” who came trick-or-treating to our door last night…
Oh yes, it’s all fun and laughter playing in and rolling around the pile of leaves.
Until several hours later, when you notice a slug crawling around your neck.
When I was a kid it always rained a lot in the fall so the piles of leaves were always wet. Playing in piles of leaves is loads of fun, but playing in wet leaves, not so much.
My last “play in the leaves” experience included finding a “yellow jacket” (a type of wasp).
The yellow jacket told me not to play in the leaves, and more painfully than your young girls did!
Leaves made outstanding highjump and polevault pits. We would use them in our backyards as such in autumn. Personally I would have traded it for a tropical climate in a second but I was not the one who decided where we lived at the time.
On the day my wife and I eloped, I was in North Carolina. The parking lot at the Court House had leaves knee deep. Huge beautiful Maple leafs. I was running along raking my feet through the leaves when my toe abruptly found an invisible curb. I don’t play in leaves anymore.:o
We rake our leaves, play in them for awhile, then burn them. I have to be very selective on the days that I burn because the smoke can waft over to the intakes of the air-handling units on the roof of the nursing home behind our house if I’m not careful. The home has repiratory patients that can’t handle the smoke very well.
I would pile them up in the front of the house for the City to pick up, but they require them to be in clear plastic bags. When it comes time to collect the leaves, the workers rip open the bags, dump the leaves in their truck, then throw the plastic bags back oto the curb As a result, instead of having leaves blowing through the neighborhoods, we have a mess of plastic blowing from yard to yard and into the streets. It just doesn’t make any sense to me so I don’t participate.
They require us to use brown paper bags that cost like three bucks each. I just blow them into my neighbors yard. Actually I don’t do yard work anymore, we have the gardner take them away. Not sure where they end up.
Actually I don’t do yard work anymore, we have the gardner take them away. Not sure where they end up.