Outside The Box

As long as the earth endures, seedtime and harvest, cold and heat, summer and winter, day and night will never cease.

There’s frost on the pumpkin outside my window this morning. There should be frost this time of year, and though I have to add an extra layer on my way to the barn when it’s 22 deg. outside, I appreciate the frost.

Frost is pretty, if you’re not scraping it off your windshield. Park facing east and it won’t trouble you so much. Frost reminds me that we haven’t broken the seasons, though they say the temperature will be in the mid-seventies next week.

Warmer is not all bad. My patch of greens is thriving. I picked tomatoes the last week of October. The box of winter clothes is still in the attic. My electric bill is slightly less painful.

Warmer is most assuredly not all good. The trees are concerned. They aren’t getting enough sleep. They keep their leaves later into the year when they should be dropping them and going dormant for the winter. This weakens them, just like the lack of sleep weakens us and makes us more susceptible to disease.

We ooh and ah at the fall colors, and what a treat to drive around leaf-looking with the windows down. That’s understandable. But this year warmer came with drier. Not good. And there are more leaves than ever. They like the extra CO2 and the warmth of the rainy season. But now that the rains have ceased, those extra leaves, those pretty leaves that bring the hordes of selfie-snappers, are falling to the ground to pile up and wait for an idiot.

They didn’t have to wait long this year. I know of one fire started by a leaf-hater who was burning leaves on a dry and windy day. That’s just dumb. Another fire began when a developer burned a pile of roots and brush from land clearing rather than disposing of it in a more neighbor-friendly fashion. Lazy, cheap, and on a red flag day, illegal and dumb.

I’m confident that no one who reads this website or indeed this newspaper is that dumb, but we all know someone who is. We need to help them understand. It won’t be easy because burning leaves on a windy day when the humidity is 20% suggests a level of arrogance that does not often yield to reason. Master of fire. I’ve got this. I’ve always done it this way. My daddy burned leaves all his life and never let fire get out.

Perhaps we should begin at a perceptual level. Leaves are not evil. Leaves feed the soil and help it retain moisture. Leaves provide habitat for a host of small animals and insects. No leaves equal no moths, butterflies, and fireflies. Salamanders and box turtles need leaf cover to make it through the winter.

What’s so special about a sterile patch of chemical lawn anyhow? Do you plan to graze cattle on your quarter acre? Are you going to play golf in your backyard, or do you just like the look of a perpetual care cemetery, maybe add a few markers to complete the ensemble? Because the lawn you see in the television ad supports about as much life as that cemetery.

A patch of green is nice to play on, but it doesn’t have to be the whole yard. And yes, when there is fire danger, we need to rake or blow those leaves away from the house, but we don’t have to burn them. Put them on the garden. Mulch the trees that contributed them. Mow them into finely chopped compost that will feed that green grass.

When the Forest Service took over the fire that began on Bell Mountain last week, they named it the Sims Branch Incident. The US Wildfire Activity Web Map says that 50 acres were burned as of 11/2. The map is sometimes slow to update, and it doesn’t list the fire as “contained” this morning, though we haven’t seen or smelled smoke for at least 24 hours. I’ll be reading the paper to find out the rest of the details.

Fifty acres is a “small” fire for an agency that manages hundreds of fires burning tens of thousands of acres. It’s not small when you live on the same mountain or the leeward side of the fire or even on the leeward side of an idiot. Have we forgotten the fires of 2016 so quickly?