Leaves

Ah.  The delights of the English Autumn.

Across the Atlantic this is the Fall.  I think they have a point.

We loved living by the seaside which we did for a number of years.  Then, in English terms, we were called far away from the sea (a hundred miles).  Consolation of a locational kind was hard to come by but I tried. 

"At least we won't get salt on the windows in winter gales!"  In this I have been proved right.

"There's all these lovely trees.  'Leafy Bucks.'  You never get all these trees by the seaside."  This is also true.

Another thing you don't get by the seaside is, therefore, a host of 'lovely trees' dispensing most of themselves on your lawn, driveway and car all in two windy nights.  I repeat - this is not Autumn, it is Fall.

But this is the thing.  Although the trees around our house are approximately the same size each year the number of leaves that I have to set to work on is by no means the same.  And this has been a very easy year.

Our driveway has no gate.  Often when the wind blows it does so  (I have always assumed) at the behest of Wycombe District Council.  Leaves that, in deference to my back, have respectfully fallen on the pavement outside have been blown into my drive for me to have extra work to do.  A man in a vehicle that is a cross between a vacuum cleaner and a dustcart purrs merrily by early some morning with no leaves to work on while the leaves that have escaped him wave sneeringly at him from my drive and then sneeringly at me as I wearily chase them around with a humble non-mechanical broom.

This year the north wind blew.  Everyone was complaining.  Temperatures dropped and leaves fell, winter coats hurriedly located, car heaters turned up, extra bedding for the pets, a general sense of winter arriving.  But me?  I was well pleased.

Somehow the north wind (which blows toward my drive) swirls around the leaves and deposits them back north - onto the property of Wycombe District Council Highways Department and the man in his motorised vacuum cleaner thingy.  I went out of the house, swept a few separatist leaves from a corner by the garage, and retreated in the warm to await the family plaudits for all my hard work.

I had a friend who was a Pastor in the East African Revival.  His spiritual experience was like my yard work experience.  His ministry 'work' was to sit in his room with a queue of people outside his door waiting, one by one, to give their lives to Christ.  I am working on ways of persuading the Holy Spirit to blow from the north.