Leaf It To Me...

September is my favourite time of year here in Naperville. The weather is still beautiful
(82 degrees today, sorry English readers,) and the leaves are just beginning to turn from bright green to warm golds and bronzes. It still feels like summer, but there is the expectation of crisp walks, the chill of the evening nipping at your nose and the spirit of Halloween just around the corner. Pumpkins and chrysanthemums are popping up on porches and in window boxes as I write.
As I look at the beautiful trees that surround my house I look in wonder how many leaves each one hosts? 20,000? A million? Just how many trees exactly are we blessed with? Too many to count. Which brings me to my point. If I could invent a machine to suck all the leaves off the trees before they fall on the ground, I could make a fortune. I could wait for them to turn in colour, then the day before the entire load dumps itself on the ground, I would suck them all up and have them taken away (or more likely tip them into my neighbour's yard).
Since spring I have been looking at the leaves in dread. Everyone that grows means more work scraping, raking and shovelling through the autumn. If we didn't do this we'd be thigh high in them everytime we left the house. My only hope is for an early winter. If the leaves were covered in a foot of snow, we wouldn't have to worry about them at all.