AsaHunt1830Farmhouse

One of the challenges of the Asa Hunt House is that it surrounded by woodlands on all sides, with a lot of pin oaks that dump huge amounts of leaves every Fall. Many of the leaves blow across the yard back into the woods, but still, it’s a big seasonal chore raking up all the ones in the grass. For a while I hired local guys to do a big annual cleanup, but they gouged us so badly we ended up in small claims court with one of them.

But then the answer arrived: a hand-me-down John Deere 425 tractor that my father brought down to us when he sold his farm in the Hudson Valley. It’s a beat-up old thing that barely gets around, but it does a great job chewing up leaves. So for the last few years, every weekend I’d go out to whatever patch of trees had dropped its leaves, and drive around grinding them into about a tenth of their size. Scoop it all up onto our wagon, and use the old Land Rover and a wagon to bring them over to our garden beds. I’d haul out a pile of cardboard shipping boxes from the garage – we order a lot of stuff online – and cut them into flats and lay them everywhere. And then cover them over with several inches of chopped leaves. Presto: free mulch and weed blocker that wouldn’t fully decompose until the following mid-summer.

When the house burned in December, I’d finished the job and the gardens were looking great. But this past winter we had very little snow and lots of wind. So a lot of the leaves had blown off, exposing the grungy cardboard beneath. So whenever we went over to pay a visit to the Hunt House, not only were all our windows blown out and covered with plywood, our beautiful rose garden looked like hell.

Meanwhile, at our little rental house in the borough, there’s a magnificent pin oak towering over our backyard and dividing us from the Catholic Church property beyond. It’s got great big arms that reach in all directions, giving it a spooky appearance, standing like a wizened old man in the moonlight. (I know this because I’ve spent a few nights when I couldn’t stop thinking about work to do at the Hunt House, looking out the back window and asking my spooky friend the pin oak for advice.) Well, this oak, just like all the others at our other house, dropped an enormous amount of leaves in our little back yard, before we had moved in in December; they had been raked into three enormous piles and left for us, the new tenants, to deal with. As borough residents, we were obligated to buy paper leaf bags, bag up all these wet leaves, and pile them neatly by the curb. Or face the shame of the many neighbors on our little street.

And then it hit me: today was trash day, so both of my trash cans have been emptied by the township. I took those, plus three empty recycling bins, out to the back yard. I was surprised that those five cans could hold only about half of the leaves. No matter. I emptied out the Volvo station wagon we inherited as a hand-me-up from our post-college son when he relocated to California. And I loaded all five cans inside. Drove the three miles over to the Hunt House. Pulled right onto the grass and around the back. Parked at the garden. And loaded a fresh pile of oak leaves right on top of that ratty old cardboard.

I made a second trip back and forth, getting a fresh tank of gas and picking up some shirts at the laundry along the way.

And just like that, both of our yards, the one we own and the one we rent, are now looking great.

It’s a first sign of spring, and perhaps the first sign of many new things to come. The process of returning home is underway.