BURNING LEAVES
It is a rare day indeed when I have
no opinions, but instead of an opinion on Cranky Opinion Saturday, I submit this
reminiscence.
We did not
have leaf blowers which would have been fun.
We had rakes, and for manpower, dad had sons. My brothers and I were
responsible for the leaf raking. It was
a lot of work, but we didn’t mind because we also got to burn them.
We did not
recycle the leaves. We did not bag them
(the biggest pain in the ass known to man) we dragged them to the street and set
them on fire.
Ahh how I
loved the sweet smell of burning, smoldering leaves in the Fall. The leaf burning ritual made the hard work of
raking and sweeping a chore we almost enjoyed.
There were
some drawbacks to the leaf burning. One
fall weekend after a rainstorm, the leaves did not want to burn. I suppose we could have waited a few days for them to dry out, but my oldest brother, Jim, was too resourceful for that.
A little
lawnmower gas might ignite those leaves. If a little gas might ignite those wet
leaves, a lot of gas for sure would get the job done. To be absolutely positive the leaves would
burn, Jim added the whole two gallon tank into, around, and on top of a huge
pile of wet leaves.
My brother
was no dope; he knew putting a match to gasoline might be a little
dangerous. Jim positioned me ten yards
away as he moved just several paces back from the leaves. With one flick he drove a match against the
match pack abrasive strip and sent that tiny flaming torch toward the gasoline soaked
pile of leaves.
The flaming
match never reached the leaves. My
brother, a future physicist, failed to take gas fumes into account. The fumes from two gallons of gas soaked into
wet leaves apparently reached a tiny bit less than several paces. The resulting explosion was instant. It knocked Jim onto his back and slightly
singed his eyebrows.
Damn that
was cool!
Stupid, but
cool!
Several
years later our town put a halt to the Fall leaf burning ritual, and most towns
in the state followed. The leaf burning
ban wasn’t from an air pollution issue, or global warming concerns; no, it was
a safety issue. Almost everyone waited
for the weekend to burn the leaves, and a large bonfire in front of every
quarter acre lot on the street created a visibility problem. It took several car accidents from vehicles
traveling blindly through smoke at about three miles an hour and a small child
almost being run over to convince our town’s leaders that the sweet smell of
burning leaves and the convenience of no bagging was not worth the residents safety.
The
lawmakers were right of course, and the new ritual of leaf bagging and
recycling is a good thing. Still I miss
those days of innocence when we did not worry about polluting our lungs,
heating our planet or blowing ourselves up.
I miss the
old leaf disposal ritual.
It doesn’t
quite seem like Fall without the smell of burning leaves.
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