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New frontiers in sidewalk insulation
Nov. 21st, 2011 02:41 pmI am so smug. I am always excessively, obnoxiously smug when my failure to do something that everybody else does and that I've been beating myself up for not doing turns out to have been beneficial.
The tree on our boulevard is a Norway maple. All Norway maples are on a schedule that may be Norwegian but may be from some alternate dimension. They stay green late, late in the fall; if there is a hard freeze they shrug off their green leaves and look insouciant; and if allowed, they turn a glorious gold in mid- to late November. Then they like to preen themselves a little. I'm sure that, whatever timestream they hail from, they know exactly when Minneapolis has decided to send in street sweepers to get the leaves out of the gutters. Then they drop about half their leaves the day afterwards, and hold onto the rest until their local human companions have raked their yards clean.
The maple on our boulevard is always the last one to drop its leaves, and the one on the boulevard of our neighbor to the north is the next-to-last to do so.
The entire public sidewalk and a good portion of the walk leading from that sidewalk to our front porch were solid with maple leaves. In a wet autumn, I'd have had to deal with them because wet leaves can become as slippery as ice. But these were dry and crisp. I did try to prevent the leaves from utterly concealing the one step down from our walk to the public sidewalk, but it was so windy that in as little as half an hour after I cleared the leaves, more leaves would gather and obscure the step again.
On Saturday, it snowed, first ice pellets, then big fluffy flakes, then pellets again, for a total of maybe two inches. I had actually planned to just let the stuff melt, since it will be fifty during the day by Thursday. But then I remembered that the person delivering the groceries would have a bit of a struggle if I didn't shovel. The mixture of ice and snow, dyed a delicate yellow by the underlying leaves, looked pretty grim. But it peeled right up from that glory of glories, a perfectly dry sidewalk. The sidewalks of my obsessive raking neighbors aren't nearly so clear.
I am so smug.
Pamela
The tree on our boulevard is a Norway maple. All Norway maples are on a schedule that may be Norwegian but may be from some alternate dimension. They stay green late, late in the fall; if there is a hard freeze they shrug off their green leaves and look insouciant; and if allowed, they turn a glorious gold in mid- to late November. Then they like to preen themselves a little. I'm sure that, whatever timestream they hail from, they know exactly when Minneapolis has decided to send in street sweepers to get the leaves out of the gutters. Then they drop about half their leaves the day afterwards, and hold onto the rest until their local human companions have raked their yards clean.
The maple on our boulevard is always the last one to drop its leaves, and the one on the boulevard of our neighbor to the north is the next-to-last to do so.
The entire public sidewalk and a good portion of the walk leading from that sidewalk to our front porch were solid with maple leaves. In a wet autumn, I'd have had to deal with them because wet leaves can become as slippery as ice. But these were dry and crisp. I did try to prevent the leaves from utterly concealing the one step down from our walk to the public sidewalk, but it was so windy that in as little as half an hour after I cleared the leaves, more leaves would gather and obscure the step again.
On Saturday, it snowed, first ice pellets, then big fluffy flakes, then pellets again, for a total of maybe two inches. I had actually planned to just let the stuff melt, since it will be fifty during the day by Thursday. But then I remembered that the person delivering the groceries would have a bit of a struggle if I didn't shovel. The mixture of ice and snow, dyed a delicate yellow by the underlying leaves, looked pretty grim. But it peeled right up from that glory of glories, a perfectly dry sidewalk. The sidewalks of my obsessive raking neighbors aren't nearly so clear.
I am so smug.
Pamela
