Everyone has neighbors. Some are close by, some are less so. Some you rarely see, some are out every day. By and large, we’ve had some doozies, but for the most part, they tend to take care of their own properties and don’t spend too much time being annoying. For as long as we’ve lived in the current house, there has been a stream of occupants in the house up the hill from us that, come Autumn, can’t seem to take care of their own leaves from their trees.

When we moved here in 2000, there were a couple of trees on the property that produced leaves. And every year, like clockwork, I would rake up the leaves and deposit them at the curb for the Village to haul to its compost pile. It’s an annual ritual that starts in mid-October and stretches until almost Thanksgiving, depending on how cooperative the trees are in dropping their bounty. Some years, it gets a little dicey in late November when we get occasional snow, which makes them harder to haul. (More moisture, heavier leaves, you get the picture)

Over the years, the trees that were here have died back and needed to be cut down. Since the property is rather small in acreage, we really don’t have that much available space to plant new ones. Earlier this year, we traded in our Subaru Outback for another Nissan Murano, and Subaru was running a promotion with the Arbor Day Foundation where, if you were going to get a new vehicle or already had one of theirs, you could get a free tree. So we went for it and were given a Swamp Oak. We discovered we don’t have sufficient property to support it, and this was confirmed by an arborist/landscaper that we employed for a different reason this Spring. In exchange for some other work, he took the sapling and planted it on his own property, and we’re hoping it lives a long and happy life with him.

Getting back to the topic at hand, we recently had a large windstorm, and the majority of the oak leaves that had dropped from the neighbor’s trees ended up in my driveway and on my lawn. They’ve been absent from the house for several weeks, and yesterday I didn’t feel any issues with using my leafblower to blow them off my property and back onto theirs. Of course, I noticed lights on in the house this evening, so they may have seen me doing that, but to my mind, their trees, their leaves, their problem. Many a year I’ve blown, raked, and hauled their leaves to the curb, and never gotten a thank you for doing so. Consequently, I don’t feel especially bad about making it their problem, since it’s theirs anyway.

And I’m noticing that the neighbor to the west is pretty uninterested in taking care of their own leaves, much like they seemed monumentally uninterested in taking care of mowing their lawn this summer. So, I expect I’m going to become responsible for their bounty as well. It never ends here.

Almost makes you want to put up a fence.