I Will Never Rake Again

One of my purchases at Lowe’s yesterday was a new electric leaf blower. My old one was conking out, plus had a weird gas-and-oil combination you had to put in, plus had the horsepower of your run-of-the-mill electric nose hair clippers, whooshing out wind equivalent of ten 3-year-olds blowing out the candles on a cake. Not so good at convincing 34 trees’ worth of dead extremities to hike themselves thirty yards across the yard.
The cool thing is that this contraption not only blows like … uh … the wind, but it sucks and mulches like the wind does not. Stick a nozzle on, it slurps up the dead leaves, grinds them up, and spits them into an attractive shoulder bag at a 10:1 ratio. GONE are the days of scraping a rake across the lawn into big piles for Ryan just to flatten out again and re-raking them all and getting wet knees arm-sweeping them into garbage bags. GONE are the days of sweeping off the patio three times a week. GONE are the days of letting our children haphazardly blow out candles themselves.

It’s a beautiful thing. Even Ryan approves. Watched me for fifteen minutes, shuffling through the big piles I had blown around, shouting “Go, Daddy, Go!” As he does.