Lessons from the Leaf Blower
Rev. Mark Stringer
First Unitarian Church of Des Moines
5/8/05

 

“The Master sees things as they are, without trying to control them.  She lets them go their own way, and resides at the center of the circle.” –Lao-Tzu, Tao-te-Ching

 

Reading

“Humanizing Mom” by UU minister Jane Rzpeka

 

On Mother’s Day, one expects to read about the wonder and glory of motherhood.  While I can tell you from personal experience that we mothers like to be appreciated, I can also tell you that a rosy and sentimental Mother’s Day…[description] always refers to mothers in some other family—the picture painted there is not me, not my mom, not my grandmothers.

 

In my family, mothers do not suffer any more than other mortals, nor are we particularly unsung.  We complain when we trip over shoes on the living room floor, and we expect a little praise for carrying the daily Grand Accumulation at the bottom of the stairs up the aforementioned stairs.

 

We do not deserve or expect devotion from our children. We wanted to have children.  It was our idea.  If they come around from time to time when they are grown-ups, we are ever so glad.  But if they live their lives as secure and independent souls, we value that.

 

Motherhood, in my family, is not always the most important job in the world.  Some of us are actually good at it, some of us shuffle along and do our best, and a few are better off in other professions.  We try to face that.

 

Mother’s Day is no time to romanticize parenthood—parenting is a down-to-earth process if ever there was one.  So this Mother’s Day, let’s humanize Mom.  Thank her for doing what she could, given all the dirty socks, thank her for loving you as well as she was able in spite of your three years in junior high, and then, let her thank you for the privilege of being your mother.

 

Sermon

I remember when I brought it home, my wife didn’t really have much to say.  Even though she must have known that I had been eyeing the shelf in the hardware store where different models had been placed at eye-level to entice people like me, I got the sense that maybe she was surprised I actually bought one.  I walked through the door, carrying the box, with a cautious smile on my face, intuitively aware that I had done something a little out of the ordinary.  “Honey, I finally got one of those leaf blowers today.”   Her response, as I recall, was simple and to the point:  “Hmmmm,” she said.  She may have thrown in a “So you finally did it, huh?” but I’m mostly certain that she did not choose to offer me encouragement.  I later discovered—and when I say later, I mean earlier this week—that she felt there was nothing encouraging in my purchase.  In fact, she told me a few days ago, “I didn’t like that thing from the moment you brought it home.”

 

So, on this Mother’s Day, let me begin by giving my loving wife some props.  After all, when I proudly brought my Toro Leaf Vac home, she didn’t bother explaining why owning a leaf-blower/vacuum contraption made little sense to her and actually goes against all her instincts. She just let me have my toy and discover its idiocy for myself.

 

I made the purchase in the late days of summer 2003, about a month or so before our daughter was born.  We don’t own a big yard, but each fall, we do have our fair share of leaves to rake, enough to make gathering the leaves a several-stage process that requires several afternoons of effort.  Knowing that with baby on the way, we would have less time to devote to raking, I figured the time was right for a little technological advance.  You should know that leaf blowers had never really grabbed my attention before, at least not as something that I would ever purchase myself.  They just seemed like noise-making nuisances designed to drive neighbors crazy.  However, the stressful time-crunch of parenthood can lead one to make some unpredictable compromises…and, you could say, some out-of-character decisions. 

 

The moment when I became charmed by the prospect of owning a leaf blower myself was when I learned that it could also serve as a vacuum, sucking the fallen leaves through its long nozzle, chewing them up into compost-ready bits and spitting them into a bag attached to its back.   Suddenly the device that was once a pesky noise machine breaking the silence of autumn mornings now appealed to me as a time-saving, effort-reducing, motorized gadget of joy that promised to transform the annual tedium of leaf raking and bagging to a fun and easy walk through the yard. So I said goodbye to raking…and hello to the 21^st century.  My neighbors, I tried to convince myself, would understand.

 

The unopened box sat in the garage for several weeks before the time came when I could try it out.  But I knew it was there, and, I’ll admit, I was anxious to give it a go. Finally, one late afternoon in late October, when I had at least an hour free—which after all seemed like plenty of time to get a good chunk of the yard clean now that I had the Toro Leaf Vac working for me—I cracked open the box and pulled my pride and joy from its plastic bag.  I breezed through the owner’s manual, snapped the few big plastic pieces into place, and adjusted the collection bag so it would hang on my shoulder as I walked.  I plugged in the extension cord and eagerly spun the plastic dial, right past the low setting and cranked it to full strength.  I admit, I was filled with expectant delight as the bag filled with air, signaling the suction had begun.  The motor was a little on the loud side, but I figured it would just take some getting used to.  As the first few clumps of leaves disappeared from the lawn and made their way through the collection tube, the contraption vibrated, crunching the leaves just as I hoped it would.  I settled into a back-and-forth sweeping motion, and enjoyed seeing the circle of lawn around me reappear.  I snickered with glee seeing the machine do its work, much like the delight my daughter shows when she watches water flow through a funnel.  “Why had I been raking for all these years?” I wondered.

 

Within a few minutes, however, the luster was already starting to wear off.  The collection tube was a little short for a tall operator like me.  The only way I could get it to reach the ground was to either bend my knees or bend by back…and neither option felt good.  I also discovered that as soon as the weight of the shoulder bag holding the shredded leaves increased, the suction decreased, requiring me to bend over even more.  I sheepishly hoped that Susan was not looking out through the window at me, hunched over my noise machine, looking like some kind of crazed beachcomber wielding an over-sized metal detector. 

 

And even when the suction was strong enough to pull a decent-sized mass of leaves into the tube, inevitably, the tube would get jammed with too many leaves, forcing me to cut the power and stick my hand inside to shake loose whatever was lodged in there.

 

And then there was the most obvious complication of using the Toro Leaf Vac on a yard covered with leaves. Every ten minutes or so, I had to stop to empty out the collection bag, a more complicated process than one might expect from the handsome, smiling people pictured on the box.

 

Even as the promise of a quick and easy yard clean up was fading with each emerging color of the autumn sunset, I resisted the urge to succumb to negative thoughts about my machine.  At first, in fact, I blamed myself. I was sure that I wasn’t using the device correctly.  So, I alternated positions.  I shifted the shoulder bag; I removed a part of the collection tube; I devised intricate sweeping motions, interspersed with frequent bangs of the tube onto the ground, intended as pre-emptive strikes against the inevitable clogs.  I even tried the low speed setting, and, I confess, I still don’t know whom that setting might be for…except maybe people who don’t really want to blow or vacuum anything at all. 

 

No matter what I tried, nothing seemed to help improve the performance of my leaf vac, at least not for long.  Yes, the thing was sucking up leaves; it just didn’t seem to be doing so much faster or more easily than what I could have been accomplishing with a rake…and without all the noise.  So what did I do?  I did what I suspect many people in my position might have done…and maybe you, too.  Without hesitation, I kept using the leaf vac. 

 

Nearly three hours later, with all the daylight squeezed out of the sky and the yard only partly leaf-free, I returned the machine to the garage.  As I walked back into the house, my eardrums were still buzzing from the noise.  No doubt curious about the fact that I had been busy for far longer than I had anticipated, Susan asked me how it went.  “Good” I said as I washed up.  I didn’t feel the urge to give her the full story.  After all, if I were to tell her that the thing had been a big waste of time, she would have wondered why I had taken three hours to figure this out.

 

Perhaps the most regrettable part of the story is not that I spent fifty bucks or so on something that didn’t really help me, but that I kept using the stupid thing…and not just that fall, but the next one, too. That’s right, I refused to give up on my leaf blower.  I kept trying to adapt my leaf-sucking technique, hoping to find the one method that would make all the wasted time worth it after all. I even dared to defy the owner’s manual, by raking up piles of leaves so that I could vacuum them even more efficiently. That’s right, I was now combining raking with vacuuming.  Now, it seemed, I really was just creating noise for the sake of noise. 

 

Of course, it didn’t take long for me to learn why the owner’s manual warned against vacuuming piles of leaves: I started sucking up twigs and other yard debris that were never intended to run through the grinder.  Even as I heard my once precious leaf vac painfully hacking through an occasional pine cone or stick, I kept forcing the issue, almost daring the thing to break.  Then, finally, mercifully even, almost as if an unspoken prayer had been answered, the leaf blower that I had once so eagerly anticipated using, fell victim to my stubborn impatience and sucked up something rock-like that virtually destroyed the grinder and made the thing even more worthless than it had been before.  Now I couldn’t use it even if I wanted to.

 

I grabbed a screwdriver and sat down with my machine in that time-honored male tradition of pretending to know how to fix something without any idea of how to actually do it.  But, in one of those fleeting moments of clarity we all have from time to time, I gave up on my half-hearted attempt to repair the leaf vac, recognizing that its destruction was actually the means by which I could regain my freedom.  I walked into the garage and traded in the Toro for a rake.  Over the next hour or so, I replaced the motorized drone of the leaf vac for the familiar scrape of metal tines gently dragging leaves across the earth.  I scooped the accumulated piles into bags and finished the job in glorious silence…silence that was only broken by an occasional bird song, and by Susan’s appearance on the scene. 

 

It was confession time.  Without giving her a chance to speak, I flashed her a smile and came forward with the truth I had been working hard to ignore for over a year.  I think I even blushed a little as I spoke. “The leaf vac was not worth the trouble,” I said.  “I would have been better off with a rake.”

 

We laughed as I explained how foolish I had been to keep forcing something that I knew didn’t work, just to prove to myself that it could.  “But,” I said, “At least I got a sermon out of it.”

 

At the time, I thought the sermon would be about being willing to change our approach to life when we know something isn’t in our best interests, or is not in keeping with who or how we want to be in the world…when we may be too attached to a particular outcome that just isn’t likely given what we have to work with.  And I suppose this sermon might still be about these things.  After all, don’t each of us have leaf blowers in our lives, things/techniques/ways of interacting with the world that we stubbornly cling to even when we know in our hearts that they are just making life more difficult, or frustrating, or noisy?  Certainly our relationships can be places where leaf-blowers abound, where we can get stuck in patterns of behavior…patterns that seem to promise quick and easy understanding and communication, even as they inhibit it…patterns that we hope will validate our choices even as they prove how wrongheaded they may be.

 

But a few months ago, I came across a quote from a psychiatrist that I can’t get out of my head…a quote that I’ve been repeating a lot lately.  A quote that I think has real wisdom at its core…wisdom for what we might call those leaf blower moments of our lives…wisdom that could serve as a thesis statement for this sermon, indeed for this entire Mother’s Day service, for it offers us a reminder that the best way to “fix” our relationships is often times to not try to “fix” them at all, but to accept them as they are…
to do our best to hang in there over the long haul,
messy though it may be,
and be willing to admit our mistakes and wrong turns--
our own contributions to the problems we face--
rather than seeking to place blame on those around us,
or look for quick remedies to complex  problems.  
The quote:  “The opposite of love is not hate…it is efficiency.”

 

So the next time we find ourselves looking for that quick fix, or stubbornly clinging to a “leaf blower” that is doing little but adding to the din of a noisy life, my mother’s day wish is that each of us may find the strength or grace, or sense of humor, or good luck, to put down the leaf vac and pick up a rake…a rake which may not be the most efficient approach either, but which can offer a much more active, intimate, and therefore meaningful connection with the fallen foliage our lives.  I like how poet and novelist Linda Hogan continues the metaphor.  She writes:

 

“There is an art to raking, a very fine art, one with rhythm in it, and life. … Raking… is a labor round and complete, smooth and new as an egg, and the rounding seasons of the world revolving in time and space.  All things, even our own heartbeats and sweat, are in it, part of it.  And that work, that watching the turning over of life, becomes a road into what is essential.” [1]

 

When I shared my sermon ideas with Susan this week and admitted to her that the leaf vac was broken, something I had apparently forgotten to tell her last fall, she offered to provide the closing line for this sermon, one that I share with you now…one that seems fitting for Mother’s Day, I think, at least in my house.  Susan says, “If you are keeping a leaf blower that doesn’t work in the garage of your life, particularly if you are keeping it in a place that is right where your wife gets out of her car…Get rid of it!”

 

Closing Words (Sarah York)

 “We receive fragments of holiness, glimpses of eternity, brief moments of insight.  Let us gather them up for the precious gifts that they are, and, renewed by their grace, move boldly into the unknown.”