Leaf Grinding

You know you live in the mountains when Fall comes around. You find yourself raking bags full of leaves as the oaks drop them, one after another, every few seconds, day after day. You get used to the sharp report a 1-2 ounce acorn hitting your roof or deck or greenhouse after falling 30-40 feet out of one of the towering oaks that provided that crucial shade all summer. You sweep leaves off the decking and driveway because the iron is so rich in the soil that if those leaves get WET, they leach enough iron to actually stain the concrete, and car paint as well. It doesn't take long either. I swear you could build a car from the iron extracted from all the leaves falling in this neighborhood.

The other thing about the leaves is it is fire season. And wind season. The wind comes up, sometimes down from Nevada and causes fires. Sometimes from Hawaii, bringing thunderstorms associated with hurricanes that spin apart a thousand miles away but still bring dry lightning, virga, and perhaps brief intense rain and hail. The lightning is the important bit. That's where most of our fires come from. We also get evil Fskers throwing lit cigarettes out the window, even today people do that on purpose. Very much on purpose. Remember that 5% of the population are psychopaths. That's MEN and WOMEN, and little evil Damian type children as well. They're quite distributed but often land in positions of power where they can hurt more people because they get things done, so if you think your boss is EVIL, you might be right.

The wind is blowing today, noisily rustling trees and dropping leaves all over the place and blowing them across rooftops and into gutters and catching in bushes and in the dead spaces up against fences. Its a mess. And tonight it is going to rain. Perhaps not a lot, but perhaps for 6-12 hours, which would be nice. It would damp down the soil and stop future fires. I can hope.

With all those leaves, I have been raking them daily for the last couple weeks, accumulating bag after bag full of leaves, each 5-8 inches across. These are deciduous oaks, not maples. I stack the bags up in the semi-basement under the house until we run out of bags, around 20 of them. Then haul them out and Dad, who is 73, and I grind them up. Its not hard work, shaking them the grinder and the other person stirring a sacrificial stick down there to keep them moving. After we're done we use a wheelbarrow to spread them around the yard and return the folic and humic acid back to the soil by restoring the Organic layer with this leaf grindage. Once it gets wet, there it goes. All that iron too.

We are fortunate that we do not live in one of the many places in this town with either mercury or arsenic in the soil. The mercury is from mining runoff. The arsenic is natural. It makes the soil a particular shade of bluish red, unlike the red and yellows of iron. For those of us who can see into the UV spectrum (work a night job, you gain the ability after a few weeks), the blues are more obvious. Also, UV light makes certain flowers look really bizarre. And birds too. This a natural thing, btw. Normal daylight tends to make the UV sensing eye cells overwhelmed and they stop noticing the frequencies. Its working nights and sleeping in that reduces daylight exposure and restores the spectrum to our eyes. I used to really freak out about this until it turned up in the New England Journal Of Medicine and the Lancet. Thank goodness I wasn't hallucinating.

In any case, the rains are coming this evening or tonight. The winds flowing out the Pacific are lovely and the sun is warm but the weather is fantastic. I've got new rain tires, at the proper pressures, so I'll be fine driving to the other libraries tomorrow. Good times.