Dear Luv Doc,
So far this year I have been doing a good job keeping in the holiday spirit, but this morning my neighbor’s landscapers woke me up at 7am with their leaf blowers and yelling. That was bad enough, but when I went outside to go to work, I noticed that they had blown my neighbor’s leaves onto my side of the street and into my yard. Now I have to worry about upsetting my neighbor by telling him his landscapers are solving problems for him by creating problems for me. I’m not some sort of Gladys Kravitz. I would prefer to get along with my neighbors, but I shouldn’t have to pay for my neighbor’s sloppy landscapers. How can I avoid starting a feud with my neighbors but not spend my holidays raking someone else’s leaves?
– Cranky in Crestview
My first thought is that you should hire the same landscapers. That will put them in a real pickle. They will have to blow both your leaves and your neighbor’s leaves onto somebody else’s property. Plus, with a little gentle encouragement to other folks on your block, you might even create a domino effect where everyone in the neighborhood starts using that landscaper. What a logistical dilemma that would be. Their only remaining choice would be to blow all the leaves into a public park, elementary school, baseball diamond, golf course, or graveyard. Dead people are already six feet under. What’s another 6 feet of leaves?
Maybe that’s been your neighbor’s landscaper’s diabolical Machiavellian scheme all along, but I doubt it. Anyone who has spent some quality time slinging a leaf blower knows that there is a limit to the volume of leaves you can effectively displace by blowing air through a tube. Pretty soon you have to start bagging or you end up spending your whole day burning a huge hole in the ozone just to move a big pile of leaves a foot at a time. Eventually you’re going to look up and notice that the 75-year-old lady across the street is kicking your ass with a rusty old metal leaf rake, cackling with glee at your belligerent adherence to the notion that technology always equals progress. Your fancy steam drill just got John Henry’d, bitch. That’s probably why she looks like she’s cackling. Or maybe she’s just panting from emphysema.
So yeah, now that we’ve workshopped it, maybe hiring your neighbor’s landscaper isn’t the brightest idea. You would only be rewarding the transgressors and there is a strong likelihood they would do a shitty job on your lawn as well. On the plus side, however, there is a solid chance they are affordably priced. No matter what the size of your blower, putting leaves into bags is a time-consuming process that cuts into profits, so it’s understandable, though perhaps not forgivable, that landscapers take shortcuts. Capitalism has its shortfalls.
The good news is that you don’t necessarily have to solve the economic problems of the landscaping industry or address the shortcomings of the capitalist system in general; all you have to do is have a slightly uncomfortable conversation with your neighbor, who I think we can safely assume you know better than I do. Even if you don’t know him from Adam, you can make some educated guesses. Does he drive a Tesla? If he does, you can thank him for his commitment to environmental responsibility and enlist his assistance to the injustice being done to you by his well-meaning but perhaps absent-minded landscapers. Does he drive a sparkling clean Ford F-150 Limited? You can empathize with him about his landscapers getting paid so much to do such a crappy job. Does he drive a rusted-out 1991 ex-church van with blackout curtains? Just call the fucking police because the real homeowner is probably in the crawl space. Anyway, you’re going to have to use your good judgment and keen diplomatic skills, and even then the whole deal could go tits up and you could end up in a decades-long blood feud. If it were me, I would probably just ignore the leaves altogether and make myself a holiday cocktail. As a matter of fact, I think I am going to go do that right now. This shit is stressing me out.
This article appears in December 24 • 2021.