SWEEPING LEAVES

I have just spent the afternoon sweeping leaves. I do it most days in the autumn. It is an arduous task, and one which does not get any easier as the years roll by. There are four huge deciduous trees in my back garden, taller than the largest apatasaurous, and over a century old. They all shed their leaves at different times, so I’m at it from now until Boxing Day. The leaves that are falling just now are being ripped out of the trees by a series of pernicious winds sweeping in from the west. These winds hurl themselves at the tree-tops, sounding like a football crowd limbering up to welcome their heroes onto the field. This starts up as a whisper and builds to clattering crescendo before easing off, pausing for breath and starting the cycle again. My technique for gathering the leaves is always the same. Go to the shed, take out the lawn rake, having swept away the cobwebs some industrious spider has built since yesterday. Gather the canvas bag, the knee pad and the plastic Betterware leaf scrapers. Take the rake and start to rake leaves into neat little piles. Swear and curse as the wind simply puts them all back where they were. Decide to bag each little pile once it has been raked and not to wait until you have several neat piles. Do this fifty times all over the lawn and you are finished. Take the canvas bag and empty its contents in the brown bin, taking care not to let the wind catch the bag or the leaves will end up all over the patio and over next door’s fence. I need to be careful in raking, because I have just re-seeded a quarter of the garden because of the activities of the Incontinent Dog. Little blades of bright green grass are just poking their heads above soil, and if I rake too hard, they’ll not be in the ground any more, they’ll be on the tines of the rake. I always have a problem with the plastic leaf scrapers. These look like the ends of a concertina, but with a row of serrated teeth meant for gripping the leaves securely. Using both serrated edges, as you should, is no good on an impoverished lawn like mine, because they immediately let through the moss, twigs, stones, sycamore wings and soil, which are the main constituents of my lawn, subsequently creating havoc for the plastic blades of the rotary mower. I have to turn one of the scrapers the other way round, and hold its serrated edge in my fingers, which invariably become jammed in the serrations. This is generally painful, and I have drawn blood from time to time. I also have increasing difficulty in lowering myself with dignity onto the knee pad. Stiffening of the joints over the years means I now lurch and topple over onto the pad, rather than lower myself by bending and genuflecting at the knee. I have equal difficulty in raising myself from the pad, too, and I get round this by doing a little half-hitch and sailor’s roll into the crouch position, and then lever myself up to my full height with the lawn rake. I just hope that nobody is watching. In two hours, I have finished the lawn and I turn my attention to the patio. This gives problems of a different sort. The dreadful winged sycamore seeds lodge between the cracks of the paving slabs and can only be prised out with a fork. The rhododendron leaves are like pig-iron, lie flat on the ground and cannot be swept. They have to be picked up with the fingers. Today was even worse because I was looking after a twelve-week-old Border Collie puppy, who thought that duelling with the sweeping-brush was a great way to develop strong teeth and jaws. Every time I went to sweep, she grabbed the bristles of the brush and worried them till I let go. I tried the ruse of using four different brushes in turn, but she simply abandoned each one I let go and started again on the one I was holding. After forty minutes, I had picked up seven leaves and five rose petals. Eventually, someone took pity on me and whistled the dog in. When I had finished, I realised from the fact that I almost had lockjaw that I’d been grinding my teeth rather a lot. I looked again at the fruits of my labours and saw several hundred new leaves in the places of the old. Wearily, I walked back round for the rake.