It was time to clean the gutters. Up and down a ladder, digging wet, stinking, rotting muck from aluminum troughs hanging from the sides of your house. It’s amazing how filled they get. How bad it can smell.
“What is this stuff?” Your mind screams as it drips down your arm, staining your skin, a tattoo to remind you of the near death experience you suffer twice a year. Your shirt is ruined where it ran down your arm, and you hope modern medicine can save the tainted, stained skin. It has to be toxic, poison. Vile and noxious at any rate. The Rime of the Ancient Mariner comes clearly into focus.
“The very deep did rot: Oh Christ.
That ever this should be!
Yea, slimy things did crawl with legs
Upon the slimy sea.”
How many of the great literary works were created after household chores?
They can launch men into space but you still have to climb a ladder and use your hands to scrape ooze from the gutters on your roof. How long, oh Lord, how long?
If that weren’t enough, you have to rake the leaves that accumulate in your yard. My front yard has two trees, I think they are the same type (brand?). But one will drop its leaves and the other will wait until the leaves of the other tree are raked and bagged. Almost en masse the leaves from the other tree will drop. You would be injured if you were foolish enough to stand under the colorful, beautiful fall foliage. Thud!
After all these years science hasn’t come up with a better plan for removing leaves from a yard. They can immolate an entire city with the push of a button, or the flip of a switch or the pull of a lanyard, but you have to labor pulling a rake across a lawn, one small section at a time. Leaves piling up, the wind carrying them back to where they were, man vs nature, nature winning again.
Once the pile is sufficient in size you can stuff them into tall, sturdy paper bags. Lawn and leaf bags, is what you look for at the hardware store. They are somewhere between the bagging, mulching, menacing lawnmowers and the woefully labor intensive, inefficient leaf rakes. Normally, they are stacked in a huge box, on a wooden pallet, there should be a picture of a stooped old man leaning against a tree crying into the rough bark.
You should buy at least a hundred of them, it takes ten to fifteen for a decent pile of leaves. You can push them down, standing on the top of the bag jumping up and down, screaming at the top of your lungs, and when you step off they will rise back to their original size. Each leaf will be exactly the same as when you put it in the bag. In a fit of blind rage you leap on the bag, stomping and smashing, murderous thoughts of fire dancing in across your mind, and the bag will rip and the leaves will spill out, and somehow they will have grown slightly, but noticeably bigger. Now you have a larger pile of leaves and one less bag. Damn the beautiful fall weather.
Lawn care can be Zenlike if you let it. Home maintenance can be therapy if you’re not careful. Don’t fall into that trap. Sure, you have to do it, but you don’t have to enjoy it. The worse you feel about it, the happier you will be when its over. It’s hard to be a hero in such a dangeroius world. There is nothing so sweet as knowing you overcame hopeless odds, tragic difficulties, insurmountable obstacles and the potential loss of life, while facing the mundane, everyday life of the 21st century. Fictional danger is the best kind, it isn’t as dangerous.
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This Post is republished on Medium.
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