A friend is in a new home a ways west of here, and this was his first autumn with his lawn. I attempted to gently persuade him - knowing he’s a gadget guy and probably has the most powerful leaf blower on the market - that especially with most of his neighbors working from home these days, he might want to think carefully of just when to make all that noise. He prides himself in not ever wielding a rake, like rakes are bad things. I fear he is not alone in these thoughts, which to me, at the fear of offending half the population, seem to be thoughts fueled by testosterone...
I should have patented by invention of the leaf pusher. (I think it was my invention.) It's a wide rake - 4-6 feet wide, built on the idea of a snow plow. You push it rather than pull. When I had a house, I built a couple of prototypes, and it's way faster than a leaf blower when there are a lot of leaves on the lawn. It's not quite as clean - it leaves some leaves behind - but who cares if next week you get a new layer of leaves anyway.
Oh well.
here ya go, some one else figured it out too. Mine was manual though.
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The drone is back, two doors down. The drone hardly left. It's reverberating through the house. It is inescapable, incessant, merciless and monotone. I briefly attempted to concentrate on my work, but the whine winds me up to an incandescent rage that prevents linear thought.
And the futility of it all: We use these infernal machines to create a fake version of a natural paradise, even though the earth and the earthworms need the leaves in the winter, even though a two-stroke engines gush pollutants into the air, destroying the nature we're trying to manicure. The town is called Maplewood, after a well loved deciduous tree. It's not called Noleavesanywherewood.
These devices -- I say again! -- must be outlawed. More important, their enablers must be shunned. Hiring a lawn service that uses leaf blowers (or, still more heinous, using them yourself) is like leaving flaming bags of dog crap on the porches of all your neighbors and ringing their door bells, over and over and over and over.
Smash them. Melt them. Dissolve them in acid. Impale them on the railroad bridge as a warning.
Get a dang rake, already.