Blowin' in the wind

Each season has its own sounds and the crunch of leaves is perhaps the pinnacle sound of fall. It's getting hard to hear the crunch these days, however, over the sound of the loud hum of leaf blowers.

I can be anti-technology when it's convenient for me and leaf blowers seemed to be taking away a nice tradition of leaf raking. However, I came home on Saturday and Anne eagerly asked me to look out in the backyard. It looked like someone had been doing some raking and that's when she told me that our neighbor had loaned us his leaf blower--Anne appeared to be a quick convert (It's a lot of fun!). I was leery, but agreed to try it on Monday. My reaction was mixed. I will confess that the blower makes gutter cleaning much, much easier. I don't have much of a soft spot for cleaning the cold black muck out of my gutters and the blower got rid of that in no time.

I wasn't overly impressed, though, with the blower on the actual lawn. When I tried blowing the leaves out from behind bushes, it just seemed to blow them to a different spot behind the bushes and I would have to do it again. Blowing the leaves in the open lawn saved a little time, I guess, but it lacks the satisfaction of a rake. With a rake, you feel like you're accomplishing something. With a blower, you're really just making noise, blowing the leaves into the street, maybe blowing them into another neighbor's lawn so he or she has to deal with it. Your neighbor, in turn, gets his/her blower out and blows the leaves right back. Really, then, a blower comes close to breaking the love thy neighbor commandment because how neighborly is it to blow leaves in his or her yard? Consider me, then, a blower agnostic. I'm not sure if I really believe in it or not.

Of course, as much as I wax on about the joy of raking, perhaps my favorite verse in relation to this activity is tied to the parable that Jesus tells about an "enemy" who comes and plants weeds in a field in the middle of the night. The slaves of this household want to pull the weeds. But the owner of the field essentially says, "Let them be." You can argue, of course, that this parable is about the kingdom of heaven. I say it's also about letting leaves stay on the ground.