Sounds of Fall Leaving

It is easy to know when summer is here or when old man winter has a firm grasp on our red and runny noses (or any other part of our exposed anatomy), but there are times in the year when we are between season. There are those times when we know spring is coming, but we just can't define exactly when that time has come. It is equally as difficult to isolate the exact moment when one can say, without any doubt, that the fall is done with and we are in winter.

While it has generally been a great fall (although it has been pretty bloody cold at 6:00 AM while setting up my booth at the Saturday Peterborough Market), we all know that one day - probably fairly soon - we (at least those in central Canada) will wake up and realize that fall has faded away and winter is here. For most of us, it is difficult to pinpoint exactly when that transition occurs.  Here are some early warning signs that it is about to happen.

Street cleaning: the street on which I live in Peterborough has a lot of big old maples. In fact ,many of the older streets in this city are lined with these majestic trees. As beautiful as they are to look at in all seasons of the year, they do tend to lose most of their leaves within a short period of time. If the leaves are left to  line the sides of the roads, they block up the storm sewers, thereby guaranteeing that at some point next spring when the snow melts, there will be floods. While I suspect that there may be other solutions, Peterborough has decided to employ legions of large mechanical street sweepers. I first become aware of these strange super sweeper/vacuum machines when I lived just across the road from the city's works department. Every morning, sometime around 5:00 AM, these damnable machines were started so that they and their drivers could be ready to clean the streets. It was not the engine noise that caused me to curse the internal combustion engine, it was the constant beep-beep-beep of the audible back-up signal as the infernal machines manoeuvred around the yard. It is truly amazing how annoying that little noise, designed to keep people safe, can be morning after morning. It grates upon one's early morning consciousness like fingernails on chalkboard.

The job of getting rid of the leaves is made more difficult because there is little  convenient off street parking in the older part of town. People therefore use the streets to park at night. The street sweepers need to go around the parked cars, thereby meaning that they need to make a number of sweeps down the streets over a week to make sure they have gotten most of the leaves. Peterborough strikes me as being somewhat overly diligent in its pursuit of leaves. I have a friend visiting me once who had her back car bumper scratched by the large brushes of a sweeper. Clearly the drive had gotten too close. On the other hand, the two year old across the street from me (as I suspect most pre-schoolers) are endlessly fascinated by these machines.

The second sound of fall leaving is the dreaded noise of someone else, forced to leave earlier than me, scraping the frost off of their car window. It can turn out to be a glorious sunny days with the temperature in the low double digits - but when you hear that scraping noise - you know. There is no turnign back, there is no way to avoid it - fall is about to leave and winter is coming.

I have heard both the noises in the past few days - I guess I need to find my winter gloves, boots and hat.