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Welcome to Stuff I Learned Yesterday. My name is Mark Des Cotes, I prefer watching hockey over any other sport on TV and I believe if you aren’t learning, you aren’t living. In today’s episode of Stuff I Learned Yesterday I share the lesson I learned while taking care of my leaves.
Friday Forum
As you’ve heard from Darrell and Mandy, Friday Forums for the month of November have been themed “gratitude”. Here’s an example, I’m thankful that in Canada, we celebrate our Thanksgiving in October. That way, we have a whole extra month to shed those overindulgence pounds before all that yummy Christmas feasting begins. OK, maybe not such a good example. Regardless, I want you to be a part of the Friday Forum and share what you are thankful for! Friday Forum is your opportunity to Share, so that other listeners and I can learn from YOU. It can be a message as short as 30 seconds or several minutes long. It really doesn’t matter just as long as it’s something that will benefit others. You can participate in Friday Forum by visiting our Feedback Page or calling our voice feedback line at 304-837-2278.
What I Learned Yesterday:
I live in a small rural subdivision just outside Cornwall, Ontairo, the city I grew up in. My wife and I purchased this one and a half acres of land when the subdivision was still fairly new and we held onto it for several years before we finally built our home. During that time we would often drive through the area and see houses going up around our lot, with our little forest nestled in the middle. You see, what drew us to this area was that unlike some other subdivisions, where developers clear everything out to make room for houses, our area was originally a forest and the developer chose to only clear what was required to put the road in. My wife and I love nature and we were drawn to this area because of the vast amount of trees. Visitors are always telling us how beautiful our neighbourhood is and we couldn’t agree more.
By the time we were ready to build in 2005 we had one of the last vacant lots in the area. I hired a contractor and together we marked off what parts of the lot to clear of trees and what parts I wanted left alone. In the end, between our neighbours and us we have a treed border on three sides with roughly 9 meters of trees on our North, 15 meters of trees on our South and around 20 Meters of trees behind us to the West. That’s roughly 30 feet, 50 feet and 65 feet for my American friends.
This was exactly what we had always wanted. We had our dream home, in a beautiful, quiet neighbourhood, and when the summer foliage at it’s fullest all visibility is cut off from the homes around us. We can enjoy the privacy of our back yard without worrying about nosy neighbours. It’s like our own private getaway.
Now enjoying this privacy does come with a price. It’s called fall or autumn depending on your word of choice. But either way, it means the weather gets cooler, the grass stops growing and the leaves change colour and inevitably fall to the ground. It’s a beautiful time of year when the leaves are changing. All the yellows, oranges and reds can take your breath away. But, it only last a few weeks and ends with a big chore to do.
I have a riding lawnmower to cut my grass. Normally it takes me a little over an hour to complete the task. Now, unlike Darrell’s story from episode 58, where he talks about Colby’s rite of passage and how father is grooming son to take over the chore of mowing the lawn, I’m actually quite protective of the task. Both my son and my daughter have mowed the lawn before but only when I absolutely couldn’t do it myself. You see, it’s my time to relax. I may think differently if I had to push a mower around by I love sitting on my mower and slowly circling the yard. On a side note here, I bought myself a good pair of noise protection earmuffs and when I mow the lawn I put in my earbuds then put the earmuffs over my ears and I’m able to listen to podcasts as I pass the time.
Anyway, back to the leaves. Every fall I have to deal with the mess they make in my yard. As I said, my lot is one and a half acres, and even with the buffer of trees, the house and the driveway, that still leaves a lot of lawn to rake. And since I have bad shoulders there’s no way I could handle the task. So my first year here I discovered that I could use the lawnmower to blow the leaves towards the edge of my yard into the trees. This usually takes me around 2.5 hours since I can’t ride around in circles like when I’m mowing the lawn. I need to go back and forth blowing the leaves in one direction. Although more time consuming, the task is actually very relaxing and I usually get to listen to several podcasts that day.
Now not all trees are the same. Some loose their leaves much earlier in the season and some are stubborn and hold out to the end. So for several weeks there’s almost a constant deluge of falling leaves. This usually means that by the time I do the front yard, move on the side and finish with the back, there’s inevitably a fresh carpet of leaves in the front yard again as I’m putting the mower away. By the next morning you can’t even tell that I had done it. A few days later I take out the lawnmower again and repeat the task. In fact I do this five or six times throughout the season.
I can hear you thinking “But that’s crazy Mark, the grass isn’t getting any longer so why don’t you just wait and take care of all of it at the end of the season?”. You know, I had that very same thought a few years ago and decided to wait until all the leaves had fallen. You know what happened? I had to rake the yard. You see when there’s a light carpet of leaves I can easily blow them with the lawnmower. As I progress the line of blown leaves gets higher and higher but it’s nothing the mower can’t handle. But the year I waited until the end, I took out the mower, started blowing and within a couple of passes the pile of leaves was so high that the mower couldn’t push it anymore. It took my entire family a full day that year to finally clear the yard of leaves. At the end we were all exhausted and sore for several days afterwards. I leaned my lesson that year and swore never to let the leaves pile up again.
Here’s what I’ve learned.
Like my mother used to tell me all the time, ne met jamais à demain ce que tu peut faire aujourd’hui. Translation; never put off until tomorrow what you can do today.
Everyone is guilty of procrastination at some point in their lives. Maybe, instead of simply filing away important papers you create a pile on your desk that you keep adding to until the pile becomes so high that it’s a big time hog to file them away. Or perhaps like my daughter, you throw clothes on your floor and leave things on your dresser instead of putting them where they belong. These small things keep pilling up and eventually when you need to clean your room it’s become a huge burden. There are so many chores and tasks we perform in our lives. Often times the quick and easy ones are, well perhaps pleasant isn’t the right word, but let’s say unencumbering, but if left to pile up these quick and easy tasks can become difficult, time consuming and lead you to resent them. So try to stay on top of things, and don’t let your pile of leaves grow too large.
I’m Mark Des Cotes and this has been stuff I learned yesterday.
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