A Perfect Fall

            Ah, fall!

            Leaves flash gold and red. The afternoon sun slants lower and earlier. Recipes appear in the newspaper for green tomato pie. Rose and dahlia cuttings get thinner. Smoke wafts from wood stoves. School's started, so neighbor kids don’t play flashlight tag past my bedtime. Folks lock their cars and doors against zucchini-growing neighbors.

            If March comes in like a lion, what to use as the metaphor for the first big storm of the season in the Pacific Northwest? It’s loud and it’s scary, like a crowd scene where no one knows what’s going on and no one’s in charge and something bad will happen. It’s November, and the temperature’s dropped twenty degrees over the past day and a half.

            Slabs of grey clouds push north. Flurries of pear and apple leaves flee across the yard, mount the fence, and race up the alley.  Across the street, poplars and bright yellow elms bend in the gusts, and everywhere spruce, cedar, ponderosa and even giant Douglas firs writhe and dance and whip around like crazed dervishes.

            I'm crazy, too. I climb out the upstairs window and begin to crawl across my sloped roof. Time to clean out the gutters. The asphalt shingles are gritty and wet from the rain which is half-hearted, annoying, and more spitting than falling. I slide bottom-first to the roof edge to retrieve the hose that I’ve tossed up here, cleverly I thought, hooking the trigger of the sprayer on the lip of the gutter. Now, it hisses a small stream of water in my direction. My perch worries me. The wind blusters in arrhythmic blasts. My weakening confidence plays games with my balance. Clumsy duck boots provide precious little purchase. The ground looms thirty feet beneath me.

            “Be careful,” says my wife helpfully from below. Yeah, right.

            I take a breath and rock forward and stretch out my arm toward the offending hose.  My body mass hovers over my center of gravity as I approach the tipping point. I remember my high school physics; there is no mystery about what I’m attempting. But I need to reach farther.  And farther.  It continues to rain. To my right and to my left, the offending gutters have collected the flotsam of a year’s worth of assorted droppings - pine needles, clumps of moss, twigs, mountain ash berries, globs of glutinous scum of uncertain provenance, and whoa, is that a dead bird?

            This task won’t wait. When water doesn’t flow obediently along the gentle slope of one’s gutter and disappear into the downspout, an impromptu reservoir fills along its length and it overflows at the lowest point. In both the back and front of my house, this occurs directly above a stairwell and a sloping driveway, respectively, both leading to the basement. Last year, an unexpected thunder and lightning storm announced the change of the season (a bit overdone theatrically, I thought), and sheets of water overflowed like Niagara and gained entry to my basement like an aqueous SWAT team on a raid.

            Skitch, scrunch, my posterior inches toward the abyss. My foot skids ominously. Whoops! Whoosh, whish, the wind taunts me from the enormous trees it’s merely toying with. I don’t look. I stare at my renegade hose and stretch. At last, I fix my cold fingers around the wet nozzle, jiggle the trigger to stop it from spraying me, and rock back on my haunches. “Hah!” I laugh. “Ha, ha, ha!” My wife shakes her head and goes back in the house. My dog looks up, then resumes her sniffing at the wet azalea bushes.

            In fifteen minutes, I complete my task.

            This is not brain surgery. I'm not wrestling alligators in a swamp.  Just tackling one of a homeowner’s annual rites of passage where the seasons abruptly jump from one to the other and the sun’s transit to and from the antipodes is marked by humans in all sorts of ways. But oh, the delicious sound of that hose blasting crud along those rain gutters, the happy report of water sluicing along, then gurgling to earth away from the foundation as it should and not into my basement, and the glorious symphony of wind and trees and spattering rain as accompaniment – literally music of a perfect fall day, no?

            Next year, though, I’m springing for a better sprayer.  I'm also hiring the 16-year old neighbor kid down the street.