A Thankless Time of Year

Fall is in so many ways a wonderful time of year. The leaves on the trees changing from green to orange and red and gold brings joy and wonder to our hearts.....and then they fall off and we are left with the thankless task of removing the bounty of of all that beauty.

I have mentioned before that Doc is a bit obsessive about home maintenace (I think I may have called him a maintenace freak) and his obsession extends to yard maintenance. Even though leaves have just begun falling here, this afternoon Doc gathered his leaf removal tools and went out and cleaned up all the leaves that had fallen in our front yard. Before putting his tools away, he stopped for a moment to proudly admire the results of his efforts. As he stood admiring, a big gust of wind came up, seemingly out of nowhere, and rattled the trees. When the wind stopped all that was left for him to admire was a yard once again covered with a  thick blanket of leaves. To add insult to injury, the next door neighbors were out and stopped laughing only long enough to tell him that it looked really nice.....for a minute.

I had been gone and Doc told me this story when I got home. I must not have offered a sympathetic enough response to the first telling because he told me the story two more times. It's not that I wasn't sympathetic, it was more that I was biting my tongue to try to keep from advising him to wait until most of the leaves had fallen before he started his clean up  (and a little that I was trying to keep from laughing). Any laughing or advice would have been thanklessly received by a maintenance freak.