Even though the world around us is going to hell in Trump’s handbasket, there is a more compelling and immediate concern we need to address.
Leaf dreck.
I don’t know about the rest of Oak Park, but in my immediate neighborhood — roughly Marion Street to Oak Park Avenue, Randolph to South Boulevard — leaf dreck is a serious issue.
Mostly it’s an aesthetic issue. Leaf dreck drapes the lawns, the parkways, overflows into the gutters and the streets. The curb cuts at every corner are a disaster. It’s ugly as sin, looks as if we were cluster-bombed by a flock of gigantic migrating birds. Brown, decaying leaf matter mixed with mud.
Leaf dreck.
It’s mostly cosmetic, but aesthetics has always been one of Oak Park’s greatest assets. And this is coming from one of our other great assets — our urban forest. Those trees produce tons of leaves, which have to be collected and disposed of … or left to decay and become a rich source of nutrients for our soil. But we can’t make up our minds. I don’t mind leaf-covered lawns, and I strongly favor eco-solutions, but we’re also fertilizing the streets and gutters and clogging the sewer vents, which becomes a real problem when it rains, as we found out last Thursday night during a biblical deluge. Pleasant Street more closely resembled the canals of Venice, though not nearly so charming.
I wish we could bundle up all this leaf dreck and have it dropped from black ops helicopters on the East Wing of the White House — preferably while Himself is in his gold-plated bathroom — with a note attached, “Thinking of you, Mr. President :-).” Is Trump really responsible for all this? Since when did that matter? We can easily take a page from his playbook since he blames everyone else for every sin he commits. Just following your example, Mr. President.
Sadly, as a member of the reality-based population in this country, I feel compelled to point out that this is our problem and we have to address it. The problem stems from our current village leaf collection system, which is, to put it politely, underperforming. This fall you had three options: rake and bag your leaves (the manicurial approach), use them as mulch for your lovely lawn and gardens (the ecological approach), or simply let nature take its course (the laissez leaves approach, which is technically not an official option). The problem with the latter is that the leaves don’t conform to parkway and front lawn boundaries. They end up in the street and gutters, where parked cars turn them into hard-packed leaf mash that never goes away because the village never cleans those streets. I don’t think street sweepers can handle compressed leaf mash. So now we have multi-year sedimentary layers of leaf muck on some of our more densely parked roadways, such as the now ironically named Pleasant Street.
Is there a solution? I’m not sure what, if anything, the village’s public works division is doing about any of this, but I haven’t been able to detect a plan in place if there is one. Until some genius at village hall figures it out, the only remedy I can think of is organizing volunteers — a coalition of the swilling — to sweep and shovel, block by block, the leaf dreck out of the gutters (where accessible) and off the sewer grates and neatly pile the mash on the parkway where, though still ugly, it can at least do the soil some good (since grass doesn’t usually grow there anyway).
In my meanderings, I have seen a couple of places where this appears to be happening. Kudos to those good citizens. Seems like they should be eligible for some kind of compensation, a tax break maybe — or better yet, amnesty for the parking tickets they incessantly accumulate. Now that’s an incentive that could inspire involved citizenship.
Personally, I would make a special plea for something to be done about the curb cut on the northwest corner of Clinton and Pleasant, which is a murky, mucky swamp pretty much year-round.
Until then, I have resorted to praying for continuous snow cover till spring. At least a good snowfall is aesthetically pleasing — until the slush turns a pulpy gray and sidewalks turn to ice where the snow hasn’t been shoveled, and the snow plows wall in the curb cuts.
But that only forestalls the inevitable. When the snow melts, we know what’s left. As much as I would love to pin this all on Himself or his ICEmen, to paraphrase Jimmy Buffet, some people claim there’s a Trump dump to blame, but we know — it’s our own damn mulch.
Somehow we need to find a way to clean these streets.
