Of all the things I hated about owning a house the thing at the top of the list was raking leaves. I HATED to rake all those miserable leaves each autumn. Our yard was full of big, tall oak trees so each year, come September the acorns and leaves started to fall. Add to that the pine trees dropping needles and you can only imagine what a chore it was to clean up the front yard. (I never raked the back yard because the leaves would cover the dirt so the yard looked better with leaves on it.) The reason we had bought our house back in 1970 was because it had all those wonderful trees on the property. Little did we think about raking leaves. Having been raised in NYC neither husband nor I gave a thought to the work that would await us each fall.
Once we moved to Florida I said good bye to raking leaves and shoveling snow. Shoveling snow was probably the second thing I hated about owning a home. Now in Florida we have landscapers to rake and blow palm fronds and any leaves that might be found. The closest I ever came to raking was when we had our Florida house with a pool in the back yard. The pool was not covered so anything that fell from the sky landed in the pool and I had to skim it off each day. NO Problem ! A very small price to pay for living in Paradise. Husband's nemesis was the palm tree just outside our back yard fence. Every year it would grow these huge bunches of seeds. (Think of a bunch of tiny grapes on their vine.) That's what would grow from the palm tree. We would watch these pods grow bigger and bigger until they would explode and drop into the pool. It was a daily chore to get them off the surface of the pool. Because I had done 90 % of the leaf raking in NY because husband worked 2 jobs the pod collecting fell to him. He would curse that damn tree every day!
But now husband and the big house are gone and so is the chore of raking. Or so I thought. We have LOTS of trees around our condo but they are all taken care of by the landscapers. We are responsible for anything inside our screened in lanai, the gardeners take care of everything outside the lanai. I do happen to have 2 plants in the lanai that drop their flowers all year round. If I leave those flowers on the ground they stain the floor of the lanai so each week I wash them off with my hose. That's it for my gardening!
Life is good. I live in Florida and don't have any fights with Mother Nature.
Except . . . Our community is filled with oak trees. All the streets are named after different oak trees. These oak trees do not have the leaves and acorns like the oak trees up north. These oak trees have small slender leaves that fall ALL YEAR LONG !!! I'm serious . . . there is no season with these trees. They don't loose all their leaves at once but instead they shed and grow at the same time. It is the strangest thing I have ever seen. The trees aren't tall and slender but rather shorter and fuller than a normal oak. Thankfully we do have a great landscaping service in the community and they keep the grass trimmed and the leaves swept.
In our community we also have assigned parking spots. As fate would have it The Man has the spot on one side of a large "oak" tree and I have the spot on the other side of the tree. Our cars a constantly covered in leaves and bird droppings. We spend a lot of money at the car wash.
This week The Man was in the hospital for 4 days because his lungs were filling with Co2, (A normal person breathes in air and the our body takes the oxygen out of the air to fuel our blood and organs. We then breathe out the Co2 so that we don'e asphyxiate ourselves. The Man has terrible COPD so his lungs don't work well at getting rid of the Co2. Instead it collects inches lungs and slowly asphyxiates him.) Luckily I realized something was very wrong and got him to the ER on Saturday. He got great care and came home on Wednesday afternoon like a new man. (He was put on a non-invasive ventilator for 2 days so his lungs got cleaned out.).
Anyway . . . It was a busy couple of days running back and forth to the hospital so when I got home on Thursday from running some chores I parked my car, locked it up and didn't get into it again until this afternoon when I went out to go to 4:00 mass. I opened my car door and out blew and ton of leaves. There were leaves on the seats, floor and dashboard. I stood there looking at the mess and thought to myself someone must be playing a prank on me. But who? And how would they get into my car which was locked? And then I looked UP . Dumb ass me had left the sun roof OPEN. I had been such a beautiful day on Thursday I had opened the windows and sun roof open to enjoy the balmy breezes. When I got home I shut the windows but never thought about the sun roof. So there my car sat for 2 days, UNDER THE TREE that happily dropped leaves right down into my car.
Freaking tree !!! I need to buy a rake.
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