A love letter for leaf piles

I’ve covered proper fall leaf pick up in an earlier blog. Briefly, avoid raking leaves into beautiful pyramids. Instead, put your tarp straight into your big piles and pile it on. Remember, the object is quick and efficient leaf removal. Leave perfect pyramids to the Egyptians.

One exception

However, there is one exception. When I was a kid growing up in communist Czechoslovakia we would make piles of maple leaves and then burn them! In this case it made perfect sense to pile the leaves high. There weren’t any municipal green bins available.

I loved helping my grandpa with the raking because I knew that soon enough he would hand me a box of matches and go back inside his villa. I lived for that weekend moment.

While my parents gave grandpa a lot of heat for encouraging pyromania in little boys, I loved him for it. My parents were also wrong. Years later I would finish my B.Sc. in natural sciences and become a green professional in Canada.

Smoke signals

There was one glitch. On weekends neighbourhood housewives would hang their laundry outside to dry. Then a little pyromaniac with matches in hand would show up and, safely protected by chain link fencing, he would smoke out their freshly laundered clothes. Oh, how they hated me.

Maple leaves don’t really burn. They just create a lot of smoke. And that was fine with me. I had plenty of time.

Disease

Sadly, those beautiful maple trees are now gone. The last one was removed in 1995 after officials determined that it was diseased. My grandpa is also long gone. He had a Ph.D. in law and spent his entire career with an insurance company. He took the bus to downtown Prague and would never get his driver’s licence.

Of course, considering the quality and look of the early Skoda car models, it was just as well. He probably knew those cars were expensive death traps.

The grind

Working in landscape maintenance can be a bit of a grind. Especially in the fall. But when I rake and tarp up copious amounts of leaves I think about my grandpa and his match boxes.

Just remember not to make any beautiful leaf pyramids. Rake and kick everything onto your tarps and move on. Soon enough the trees will run out of leaves. I wish I could burn some of them.