Fourteen December, Oh, Wait

I started to reply to an email from my friend Dave back in Wichita, and then thought that maybe it would make more sense just to put my text here, with some elaboration.

Sometimes I think the weather - or storms and fronts - pass over Wichita a day or two before arriving here. Other times it seems like we get something entirely different. I suppose this is no surprise to anyone who likes to watch National Weather Service radar and satellite images.

Two weeks ago, on 29 and 30 Nov, we finally finished raking the front and back yards. Cindy had done a little (OK, she says it was more than "a little") raking through the earlier weeks of fall, and she'd already sent about 15 lawn bags - that's about 500 gallons - of oaks leaves to our municipal composting facility. Saturday the 29th was a beautiful sunny day with a comfortable temperature. As is usual for Saturdays, Cindy was working all day. With kids occasionally helping, sort-of, it took me about five hours of raking to drag the rest of the snow-covered leaves, another 500 gallons of them, into a giant pile in the driveway. At this point, I wish I could insert pictures of the kids buried in a Subaru-sized pile of dripping-wet leaves, but I didn't stop raking long enough to get the camera. Their new coats were quite a mess.

By the morning of Sunday the 30th, the temperature had plunged, and big snow was in the forecast. I looked out the window hoping that a big wind, or big truck, or a big something, might have made that big leaf pile disappear. No luck. Since Cindy had spent the day inside at work on Saturday, I thought she'd like to get up early and start stuffing the leaves into those big brown paper bags. Besides, I had some big boards to cut and sand in the basement where it was warm. Cindy got about half the big pile bagged by the time I got out to help her, and by 10 a.m. we'd filled 15 bags and stuffed the remainder of leaves into the big garden in the front. Those 15 bags sat fermenting in the garage for about 8 days, because after the first of December, the trash service doesn't pick up compostables any more. So we had to stuff all 15 bags, dripping with brown slop, into the van so Cindy could haul them off to the colossal compost mound in North Lansing. Then it was off to the big back yard.

The back yard hadn't received any raking all, so the leaves were about 6" deep throughout the entire yard. Not a blade of grass was showing. We'd have enough of bagging, and were out of bags, so we simply moved all the leaves from the grass into the gardens. Well, maybe they aren't really gardens. What would you call them? Our back yard has these big areas of shrubs and bushes and trees, under which there is a floor of old mulch and crumbled oak leaves. So that's where we put this year's leaves.

When we started raking in back, it was cold, but the snow hadn't arrived. After about an hour small flakes began to fall, and by the time we were done, large heavy flakes were falling fast. Our neighborhood is fairly quiet, and the sound of the flakes was wonderful and sort of magical. It was very fun - all four of us were raking as fast as we could (the kids actually helped this time) with snow falling all around and sticking in the newly uncovered grass. A few hours later, we were shoveling the driveway. We shoveled twice that day. Since then, we've had two weeks of snow and temperatures below freezing and had not seen the grass until today.

Oh yes, then, back to Fourteen December. Today our thermometer finally rose above the freezing mark, and even reached into the 40s. F. Don't forget the units, science guy. Patches of green grass have emerged in our crusty white yard. The icy glaze that was nearly preventing our van from ascending the driveway, forcing us to get a running start, has melted. I had hoped we might find time to get out and enjoy the warm weather, but only Quinn managed to spend a significant amount of time outside. There was baking to be done, and a bit of shopping. Abbey and I played some basketball in the basement.

So what was the point of this blogging exercise? Just a short essay about life in late fall in Michigan? Perhaps. Oh, wait, now I remember. Dave had written a little description of something he witnessed Saturday in Wichita when the wind was blowing at 40 miles per hour (for you metric thinkers, that's approaching 1.8 meters per second). He and his dad saw a small plane overhead flying towards its airstrip, into the wind, engine racing, with a ground speed that appeared to have been, well, not much above zero (no units necessary). So borrowing from and elaborating a bit on Dave's thinking, my question is, with a really strong headwind, would it be possible for a pilot to land a plane with a negative ground speed? It would be quite a trick. Along the sides of our driveway, we have little orange and reflective sticks to help us stay on track and out of the ditch when be back the van down in the snow and in the dark. I wonder if they have rear-view mirrors in those little airplanes for backwards landings.

Off to bed, then, and expecting a big wind in the morning. Hoping the coming week is a good one with lots of good news.