When you’re living in the leafy Lower North Shore of Sydney, Sunday means two regular sounds: hundreds of coffee machines producing soy, decaff lattes in the cafes and the dulcet sounds of leaf blowers.
I’ve never quite understood the point of these – blowing the leaves around so the wind will come and put them back exactly where they were before is, for me, the epitome of “rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic”.
However, as this household has a few to choose from (yes there are multiple leaf blowers – don’t ask!) and we like to do a big cleanup before we leave a place (moving out this week) I decided to give the blowers a go.
On the face of things they worked – they blew the leaves around. I was able to get them to go where I wanted and it was all looking rosy. The driveway was nice & tidy.
Until…
The wind came up. Is there some rule that says when the wind comes up and you’re in the middle of moving the leaves from one location to another, by some quirk of nature, the direction you’re trying to take the leaves is exactly the opposite of the direction the wind is blowing? Of course, that was my experience.
The result was that as I blew the leaves one way the wind blew them straight back again. So, by the time I’d got to the end of the driveway, I needed to start again.
Added to this case of urban insanity is the fact that most of these machines are petrol driven. On top of providing lots of noise there is that aroma of two stroke petrol being burned. It brings to mind the line from the movie Apocalypse Now: “I love the smell of napalm in the morning”.
Fortunately, the ones in this household are electric. The noise is possibly just as bad but the pollution is slightly less (it just relocates the fumes to a power station situated amongst rolling hills in the countryside).
So, if you want to clean up leaves, use a rake. The outcome is the same and you can even stop paying those gym fees because you’ll get all the exercise you need right at home.
All-in-all, I feel like I’ve had my little dabble on the dark side. I still don’t get the attraction of clearing leaves using a noisy, smelly reverse-cycle vacuum cleaner.
In last week’s post I talked about the impact of having a fire in the house. I received this from a friend and was so touched by it I wanted to share it with you. I thought about cleaning up the language – he’s not a native English speaker or writer – but then decided to leave it in his own words. I hope you enjoy it and are moved by it as much as I am.
“I loved the fire, for many years, for 30 years, I cut our firewood and we bought some too.
At Berowra Waters, I could go up in the bush with my workboat and cut a huge log, there were some dead trees standing up. I towed down to the house and pulled it out of the water with my winch and cut it in one meter long pieces. I always placed 2 pieces, side by side in the huge fire place I built . This lasted 3 to 4 days. We had to feed small kindling between the 2 logs and keep a small gap between them. There was always a fire in the house. During the day when we were at the boatshed, 300 meters away, we let the fire smolder, and in the evening, we blew a bit of air on it and started it again. It was fantastic and it did give us an atmosphere of real HOME.
And after: since about 12 years, I was always in a hurry for everything and I thought that I did not have time to cut my firewood. Jobs for the clients were more important. And we started to buy fire wood and later we just click this AIR-CON system. Because I was tired , as I came back in the house at 5. When the girls were still home, I had a fire in this slow combustion stove. And just like at Berowra Waters, the embers stayed from one day to the other. I just had to open the air inlet & the damper in the evening to start my fire again. The house was always full of life. We always had girls or boys from abroad in our house. Middle East, Paris, Switzerland. 2 sisters from Sapporo for a year. Boys from Switzerland. Girl from Chartre. It was great, because we were, somehow all of us traveling without going abroad.
Later on, things changed. Jessika went to live with dear Blair. They were together since they were about 15.
Later on, when Claudia told us that she was leaving home, I cried. It was the end of an era.
A type of family atmosphere, I knew I would never have again. This contributed probably to my lack of enthusiasm to make our fire. This is life.”