Herding leaves.

I hate a task that wastes my time, and raking leaves is just such a one. I spent the better part of this evening leaf-blowing and leaf-raking, and I'm not at all happy about it. While I was working, I tried to find the poetry in what I was doing, and what I kept coming back to was the idea of how frustrating and sad it is to shepherd a dead season around a yard, and how much less of use than shepherding living things. At one point, knees-deep in the last pile, I thought of the times when I or my friends and loved ones have found ourselves stopped by livestock: cars surrounded by sheep, buses stalled before goats. A friend of mine once weathered a storm of sheep just by standing still.

The bottom line is that I do not enjoy yardwork, in any way, not even if the weather is nice.

Before the frustration started, we had a lovely day here. Mid-Ohio is setting high temperature records; we pushed into the mid-60s today. Best of all was the sun, which feathered this strange tree (which I pass often but never research) so nicely:


It's looking as though pictures from yesterday's drive will wait until tomorrow. (Unnecessary temporal complication? Yes. Not as good as spam frivolity, but it will have to do.)