Friday, October 17, 2008

Leafsweeper

They lay all over the grass, sparkling and twinkling in the autumn sun; next door's pear tree leaves, challenging me with a cheeky nudge. I tried to ignore them; been at work, no energy for raking, starving hungry, too lazy, etc etc etc.
But every time I passed the window they were staring back in at me, giving me evils and messing with my head.
So reluctantly I wedged my feet into my elephant-hide gardening shoes with their well-worn treads, plodged across the muddy grass and clumbered the wire rake out of the shed from its tangled pile of garden implements.
'Pring!' exclaimed its musical prongs as I extricated it from behind an upturned lawnmower, redundant vacuum cleaner and two grubby cat-baskets.
'At last I can be useful!
It grappled playfully with the mower lead that was hanging from the back of the shed door in a knotted lump.
Scrape, scrape, scrape, scrape, scrape and endless scrape...
Two piles of soggy, leathery pear-leaves were heaped on the lawn, finally.
I put the kettle on.
As I looked out of the window while waiting for it to boil, little wisps of wind played breezy little tricks on my leaf-piles.
'Hee hee hee', they snickered. 'We're gonna make her do all that work again!'
Leaf by leaf, they started to dismantle the leaf-piles, placing the dislodged leaves just far enough apart to be a nuisance.
'Merde!', I said in English.
Back to the shed to fetch a rusty shovel, round the side of the house to drag the Green Bin up on to the grass. Shovel-plop, shovel-plop, shovel-plop, into the bin go the leaves.
Except for the last shovel-load.
Do you know what? I just couldn't be bothered. Let the wind have 'em!

How can you guess there's nothing on TV tonight?

5 comments:

Geraldo Maia said...

Hello Helen,
It is a great pleasure to visit your nice and interesting blog for the first time.
Best wishes from Brazil:
Geraldo

Helen McCookerybook said...

Thank you Geraldo! That's a record for a comment appearing just seconds after I did a posting!

Suzanne Forster said...

ha! Great little story :-)

chimesey said...

Yes - I enjoyed reading this. Soon the leaves will be gone, and we can forget about the pringy rake for another year...

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