It’s the chore you think you're going to finish in an afternoon but after a few big piles it starts raining, and everyone knows it’s folly to rake in the rain. Weeks later you get to a point where there’s one more leaf piled on your front curb than swirling in your yard, you declare a majority, and you check it off your list.
Then some Saturday morning weeks after VL-day you hear an early, rare sound, like something descending too close. You get dressed and go to the front window, hoping in your secret heart to see people hurling themselves down the inflatable slide of a misplaced jumbo jet, or at least buildings on fire.
Men in construction vehicles and men with leaf blowers make slow, reiterant progress up and down the block. There’s a quality of municipal gentility, of man reliant on his fellow man. And also one of alien invasion, of HR sentinels for a superior and disinterested race emptying a target planet of non-essential life.
Now a few spared leaves swirl, a few stay stuck to the street, pressed and faded etchings of recent history. There are days, love, when the things we never say ring loud inside, like lies of omission.
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