No More Mrs. Nice Guy

I have about half a dozen huge oak trees on my suburban-lot-sized property. This is a ridiculous amount of oak trees. If there's one thing I don't want around it's anything that says to the squirrel community "come on in."

So when I moved in two years ago I called a couple of tree guys and asked them to take the trees out. Well, one or two of them anyway.

This request unleashed a torrent of bitter regionalism.

"We can't take out those oaks! Those oaks are valuable! You East Coasters are so smug! You think you're so superior with all the oak trees you got back there! Well this is the Midwest and we value our oaks! So there!"

So now with fall almost over my yard is full of fallen oak loeaves. And I mean full. You have to wade from the back door to the garage.

My husband and I agreed we'd spend this weekend on fall cleanup. But I have a plan: I've got to get to the leaf-blower first. Because I know what will happen if I don't. My husband will spend an hour blowing all the leaves into a huge pile. Then he'll beam with pride and say "Look! I cleaned up the yard!" Then he'll leave it to me to stuff the leaves into bags. Because, after all, he already did all the work, right? He "cleaned up!"

Well not this year, pal. This year I'm grabbing the leaf blower if I have to get up at 4am to do it. This year I'll be the hero who makes the huge leaf pile for the kid to jump in. Oh, I know that's your plan. You want all the glory parts.

And this year I won't be the only one who spends days, DAYS, stuffing dried up oak leaves into huge bags and lugging them to the curb and then driving back to Costco for more bags. Not this year.

Not.
This.
Year.