If there’s one thing we’re really good at in this small Michigan town it’s seasonal cleanup. Bring on the massive snowstorm and we’ve got loaders and graders and plows and dump trucks ready and rollin’. 18 inches of snow today and by afternoon the next day it’s bare pavement, open parking spaces and navigable sidewalks.
The same holds true as autumn comes to close. This most beautiful season seems to just edge its way onto the stage over the course of so many weeks. Then, within what seems like a moment it sings out full volume, bursting with color and all the stored emotion of the past summer. And then autumn takes her bow and begins her retreat into the wings.
As I write this she is in full retreat. A landscape which just days ago seemed loaded with bouquet after bouquet of reds and yellows and gold is now just a sketch of its former self. Here and there a tree stands which, like the tardy student to class, seems to have not gotten the message or not cared enough to get the project done on time. But otherwise, the majority have completed their work and stand bare; many with just a few reluctant leaves punctuating the intricacies of their many branches with spots of color.
On the lawns and in our streets the winds of the coming winter have had a field day blowing leaves from one neighbor's yard to another, from one well swept curb to another, reducing the children’s hay mounds of colorful leaves to expansive oceans of colorful debris. And the rakes and the blowers seem to be active for days on end, even into the evenings, pushing and pulling these remains of the summer into assorted piles again and again and again—until today.
Today it ended. This morning the plow trucks arrived pulling their leaf vacuums and shredders. And behind these came the street sweeping machines and the dump trucks heaped with leaf remains and the unfortunate few on foot with brooms to capture any escapees. In the wake of their passing the lawns are green and bare, the streets are clear, and the trees pretty well without foliage.
A few neighbors, like a few of the trees, weren’t entirely on the ball and they will have to work on to tidy up the remains of the season. The trucks and the sweepers will make one more pass in a few weeks and then it will job done. All assignments will have been completed: all lawns will be brown and all trees will be bare, and the winds of November will usher in the gray skies filled with the snows of winter, ready to whitewash the entire barren landscape, drape us in white like furniture under the sheets in a summer cottage at the close of the season.
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