The House With No Leaves

This neighborhood of mine is full of cape cods that were built in the 1940s and surrounded by trees, lots of trees. It was the appeal of these old homes and well-established trees that drew Mark and I to this area and why we wanted to live here. Those trees, though, can cause a lot of problems. Many years ago we had an epic ice storm in October. The branches were heavy with leaves that hadn’t fallen yet and then got coated in ice. When I took the trash out in the late afternoon, all I heard from every direction was snapping limbs. It was terrifying, and Mark and I were awake all night listening to branches crashing to the ground as the sky lit up with blown transformers all around us. We would be without power for five days until an army of lineman cleared brush and climbed pole after pole to restore power.

While the fall isn’t usually that dramatic, it does bring an avalanche of leaves that seem to never let up. Every weekend, homeowners are out raking, blowing, and bagging leaves. Mark and I tackled it year after year, and when the kids got older we made them help us. At first it would be a fun kickoff to the fall season, but that got old quickly when after a marathon raking day the yard looked no different 24 hours later.

A few blocks away is a house that never has any leaves in their yard. I first noticed it because it was the only house on the street where you could see green grass, and then I got kind of obsessed with it. How did they go through the entire fall season without a single leaf on their lawn? How did they not have them clustered around the bushes and blown against the fence?

It was so odd to me that I needed to talk to Mark about it, and when I did he asked me why I cared. “I care,” I said, “because every yard in every neighborhood in this entire town is covered with leaves but that one. You don’t think that’s strange? Doesn’t it make you think of a Dateline show with Keith Morrison asking in his husky, doubting voice, “Where did the leaves go?” Besides Mark having no idea who Keith Morrison was, there was only so much of me he had space for in his head and The House With No Leaves was encroaching on more important stuff. One day I made him drive by to see for himself and still he did not care, so I was a lone wolf trying to figure out what was going down inside that perfect house. Weeks passed by until Mark came home from the hardware store one day and said, “I went past that house and you’re right. There’s never a leaf anywhere in the whole yard. It’s weird,” and I loved him so for finally noticing that something was very wrong in Mayberry. That opened the door for me to tell him that I think this couple must sit in their living room and watch for leaves to fall and Leaf Man screams, “MOTHER!!! We’ve got a trespasser,” then goes outside, shakes his fist, locks and loads his leafblower, and blows that thing to kingdom come. How this gets repeated over and over and over with the maple trees and the oak trees, and Mother drinks all day because he goes off the deep end every autumn and no matter what she says he rides that rail all the way to Crazytown. “Why do you think it’s him?” Mark asked me. “Maybe she’s the one obsessed with the leaves.” I asked him how many women he’d ever seen with a leafblower in their hands. “I’ll answer that for you,” I said before he had a chance to open his mouth. “None. Speaking for all women we hate leafblowers. We hate the sound of them, we hate men’s obsession with them, we hate the minute the garage door opens and that thing comes out.” Mark pointed out that we didn’t even own a leaf blower which was true, but I have a fondness for making sweeping generalizations to prove an inaccurate point.

Then winter came along and up the street from the House With No Leaves was a house that was decked out for Christmas. I drove by it many times and my thoughts were always the same. What in the ever loving…….? This house had every kind of Christmas decoration in their yard and on their roof that you could imagine. There were cables running up into the trees with lights wired to them and a star haphazardly dangling from the roof. Every time I drove by I felt like knocking on the door and offering unsolicited advice on behalf of a neighborhood that was dazed and confused. I made Mark drive by it one night on our way home from a party and he asked, “What am I looking at here? I can’t even tell what all this is.” “Right??? “It’s like they go out and shop the after Christmas sales and buy everything that’s left, store it in the garage for months, and then shove it all into the yard every December. There’s no theme. There’s no cohesion. It’s a gigantic Christmas cluster.” Then we laughed and high-fived each other because even that plastic half-price Jesus with Frosty stalking him knew the Fishers were better than everybody else.

The other day I drove down the street of The House With No Leaves. The lawn is still immaculate and the Christmasclusterpalooza House was its annual mess. I wished Mark were around to trade scathing critiques and snarky observations with me, how everyone tends to think I’m so nice, so sweet, so blah blah blah, but he was on to the scam. Now he’s gone and what am I supposed to do if I meet someone that actually buys into the idea that I’m a nice person? How long can I keep that up before I let it slip that there’s landscape architects for a reason? That you don’t hodge podge your boxwoods, roses, and hostas like some outdoor checkerboard game, that just because they’re on sale doesn’t mean you load dozens of them into your SUV.

If I already pre-pity the imaginary oldmanfriend who wants to get to know me better over dinner, a guy who drives a cool vintage truck, has a nice smile and great laugh, who likes to read, and is up on current events, maybe it means that I really am nice.

I’m kidding.

It means Leaf Man and Christmasclusterpalooza Guy have saved a seat for me on the rail to Crazytown.