The dark and daunting underbelly of foliage season

My wife Liz calls it an obsession, but I prefer to think of it as a quest for order in my little corner of the universe.

I’m talking about leaves. Maple leaves. As I write this, they cover the back yard in a crunchy golden blanket, together with their compatriots from our lone birch and pear trees.

It is true that I am a bit fanatical about raking leaves, perhaps because I know, in my heart of hearts, that each individual leaf is taunting me as it falls to its resting place on the lawn.

Every four or five years, it seems, we hire someone to cut down another junk maple along the perimeter of the yard. This has worked wonders for our gardens, by exposing them to more sunlight. Yet every fall, by some arborial alchemy, the shower of leaves is as heavy as it was the previous year, no matter how many trees have fallen to the chainsaw during the interim.

Some of my neighbors seem to have a profound philosophical objection to raking leaves. I think they may hire clandestine relocation crews to dump truckloads of them in my yard under cover of darkness, but that's just a theory.

I’ve built two large compost bins at the far end of the yard, which is a boon to the gardens because we get plenty of compost without paying a penny for it. But it is a strange fact of life that bins which seem large and bottomless when empty suddenly become small and inadequate when I start pouring leaves into them.

The city where we live picks up bagged leaves and composts them at the landfill, but there’s a downside to that solution. First, I have to buy bags. Worse still, I then have to use them.

I don’t really mind raking leaves into a bucket and then dumping them into the compost bins. But for some inexplicable reason, I positively detest bagging the darn things. Perhaps it’s the effort involved in keeping the bags open and upright while trying to stuff their gullets with leaves.

We got about two inches of snow last night, even though there are still plenty of leaves on the ground, and some that have yet to fall. But even under their blanket of white, I know the leaves are giggling and snickering as only fallen leaves can do, daring me to find and remove them.