Leaves

So, we made it through the coldest night of the year, the coldest night, apparently, in twenty-three years! It dipped down to seven degrees.

Don't go pfffft at me, you Northeast bloggers, you Chicago bloggers, you, up there in Maine, Charlie. Seven-degrees is c-c-c-c-cold for us; just least week it was seventy-degrees, and now this. I know it isn't 11-below, or 15-below, but it was cold, for us, here, in Smallville.

This morning, after breakfast, Carlos decides to do the recycling, so he loads up the car with cans and bottles and plastic and cardboard etc. And off he goes. When he returns, he tells me he wants to take the bags of leaves that he filled a week or so ago.

Now, I must say that the people who owned this house before us were apparently allergic to yardwork or raking leaves because we've hauled hundreds of bags of leaves, and that is not an exaggeration, from the yard in the year-and-a-half we've lived here and still aren't finished. There were so many dead, decaying leaves in the backyard after we moved in that, once we cleared them away, a whole meadow of wildflowers sprung up and all the neighbors complimented us on our beautiful garden.

The former owners also never met a horrid color they didn't want to slather on the walls. The dining room was flesh colored, so I felt like Hannibal Lechter sitting down to some Fava beans and a nice Chianti eating in there. The kitchen was navy blue sponge paint. Yes. Sponge. Paint. There were other colors, like dandruff, and spoiled milk, urine yellow, and in the master bedroom, a lovely wallpaper border of pineapples and fruit baskets--I know!--that I decided to take down the day we moved it.

It was stapled to the wall. I literally stood in one corner, grabbed one end and pulled it down....rip...rip..rip....from each and every staple

Anyway, back to the leaves.

I remember telling Carlos, the day he was to bag the leaves, not to do it. It had rained for a couple of days and the leaves were wet, so the bags would get very heavy when it came time to shove them in the back of the Saturn and take them away. But did he listen.

Uh, no.

He filled several fifty-gallon bags with leaves, and this morning, he decides to take those away. Only he can't lift them because he filled them to the brim with wet leaves, and now they weigh a ton. So I go out to help him hoist bag after bag into the car, and I say, 'How are you going to get these outta the car and into the dumpster?'

'You're coming with me.'

Uh-huh. Okay.

I head into the house to get my jeans on, a ball cap, and my shoes.I come back down the hall and look through the living room window and he's driving up the driveway and away from the house. I wondered if 'You're coming with me' was Spanish for 'I can do it myself.'

I'll have to get out my Spanish-to-English dictionary.

I'll also have to look for a woodchipper, so the next time Carlos does this I can 'Fargo' him.