What do you do to be involved in the community?
Based on A True Story
Beaverton, Oregon – where they chop down trees, and name streets after them.
Introducing Leif
Tulip Court is a little street with five houses in the suburbs of Oregon. As the name implies, it is not even a street. It is a court. It is a neighborhood that is locally famous for naming streets after the trees they recently cut down. Naming of cul-de-sac follows a different protocol. Leif Swavely lives here on one of these cul-de-sacs. They just endured wildfire season followed by a week of rain. Today is a pitch perfect Oregon fall day. Because of the heavy rain and wind, only some of the tree’s leaves are still on the trees, painting the streets with a distinct artists touch.
Leif lives in a secluded cul-de-sac where nobody can drive or even walk-through. His job, in his own mind and it is a dream job to him. Leif’s mission is to rid his cul-de-sac of leaves. When he walks out into the garage right after breakfast, he has a shot of adrenaline and pride. He notices the screwdrivers are out of order and makes a mental note to talk to his wife later. The neighbors abhor the sound of his leaf blower, but he does not care. He gets up every morning at seven and fires up the leaf blower looking for leaves that fell from the tree. Old cars in various states of disrepair sit in the neighbor’s driveway across the street. That did not sit well with Leif as he cared about how his neighborhood appeared. He did not know his neighbors all that well. He considered himself a busy man and kept to himself.
One day, he woke up, hung over, and decided to get proactive about ridding his property of multicolored leaves. The rains of late October were ready to begin. He preferred not being out in the rain using the leaf blower. That is why he switched from electric to gas. Although he loved roaming the neighborhood with his leaf blower strapped to his back, he was ready for the season to end. Some busy bodies in the neighborhood referred to him much like they would spotting Bigfoot in the wilderness. He was an oddity that most people put up with.
He was not much of a drinker, but the leaves of the trees were driving him to drink. This explained his lugubrious hangover this morning. It may sound like a double redundancy, but he certainly was in a weird mood. Or was he going mad? He was especially distraught over the lack of orderliness in the garage. The ladders, not sorted by size, were disorganized and one even rested on the ground. He wondered what his wife was doing right now.
He decided to take matters into his own hands. The leaves that remained in the trees hung menacingly. Despite the lack of order in the garage, he grabbed the second largest ladder he owned. Admittedly, he was afraid of heights and never scaled the biggest ladder. The wind picked up, as he clumsily walked the ladder to the far corner of the yard and placed the ladder below one of the trees. The tree was one which had leaves, not yet fallen from the tree. The wind grew in intensity as he climbed nervously one slick rung at a time. He placed himself amongst the leaves with both of his feet precariously clinging to the tree. He turned on that leaf blower and blew every leaf out of the tree. He felt like he conquered the world. Still, it left a pit in the hole of his stomach. It seemed too easy, but what would he do tomorrow morning? He stood wearing his off, colored Batman shirt contemplating this conundrum. Then, the branch he was leaning on gave way, sending him tumbling into the wet autumn sky. Luckily, the ladder broke his fall to earth. He fell hitting the third rung, then the first rung and then hit his head in the soft grass. Much to the annoyance of the neighborhood, the leaf lower kept blowing in the wind.
On their morning stroll around suburbia, his neighbors Gatraude and Hans found his bruised, ego, clinging to a slightly more bruised body. An ambulance drove him to the hospital hospital right down the road. They were greeted at the front desk by Heidi, who was working her dream job as a psychological specialist, looking at peculiar cases. She has seen many cases of the delusional leaf blower, driven crazy by that one last leaf that hits the cul-de-sac. There is no cure for the disease you can only contain it. Heidi knows that, but it keeps her employed. She looks at her charts and then the monitors on the wall and she finds the patient a fine physical specimen, almost athletic. He is obviously not happy to be here and seems to be be randomly pulling at his hair. He is nearly bald and his friendly hawkish blue eyes peer over the top of the covers. He listens attentively as they ask him a long series of question.
“No, I never thought of hurting myself, but that neighbor across the street. It is different story.”
“I did not ask you about the neighbors across the street.” says the doctor showing a hint of irritation as he thought this would be a routine conversation and he could discharge the patient.
“You need to get to get some fluids into you to flush the bruises out of your system. And you need to get some more sleep.” Leif protested briefly, but he was asleep quickly.”
The brilliant light coming into the windows was at a different angle than he remembered. It felt like a different room. Leif just woke up from a long dream, the longest sleep he has had in months. Autumn is a busy time for him. He dreamed of riding a train through tunnels in the Pyrenees and smoking a cigar. He had a peaceful easy feeling and glanced out the window, at peace with himself. That is until he saw a leaf slowly falling onto the ground outside his hospital room.
He whispered to the nurse ‘get me out of here’, as he watched another another leaf fall from the sky. They gave him another shot of bitch be gone pills and went back to filling out their paperwork.
And in walked, a young woman, with glasses and a clipboard, working on her PhD who was to serve as his councilor. That, in my opinion, is a dream job, but today her job was getting her staff in order. She needed to free them to do the research. People who were obsessed with things such as leaves in their lives was quite common. They did not have a great record of accomplishment of curing it, but it was certainly part of their revenue stream. The line of what was most important become blurry. She moved to Germany many years ago to avoid this type of thing but here she now stands in the labyrinth of what we call capitalism. She stood there and watched a leaf fall slowly from the tree, and it kind of bothered her.
My Pictures Of You 
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