Monday, December 1, 2008

BOSTON RESIDENTS LEAF COLLECTION

(October 27th to December 5th)

The first time I saw the above words on a big sign in the neighborhood next to mine, I thought, What a great idea! Residents collected pretty leaves from their neighborhood, and then a local artist arranged them all into a public display.

My mind sort of went crazy for a few moments, thinking about the awesomeness of a community leaf collection.

Maybe there will be photographs of the individual people to go alongside it... or perhaps stories about the trees or the streets where the leaves were found.

I was in the middle of wondering the methods by which the leaves had been preserved (or whether their transience and inevitable decay had been one of the themes of the art installation) when I realized that the sign had been put up by the public works department so that people could have the leaves they had raked into yard waste bags removed to be composted at the city's facility.


Bummer. Oh well, it still makes me smile to pass by there on the bus.

4 comments:

Alex said...

Hey again...I was led here by Facebook and just had to laugh at this post. Was it by chance the huge sign in Union Square by the Jackson-Mann school? I used to ride the bus past there on my way to high school, staring out the window in my morning daze.

I remember when I was a kid, my dad bought a Leaf-Eater to shred waste from our not-so-huge yard. It was this little beast of a machine that sat on top of a trash can, and he'd dump leaves in by the armload to be devoured. It must have been just the following year when the city started collecting leaves, because that poor Leaf-Eater has gone hungry ever since.

Anyway, I think it's hilarious that you had such a romantic interpretation of something that was always perfectly mundane to me. Thanks for the chuckle!

Sad for a While said...

When I read the title of your post, I thought of exactly the same thing (but with less detail) and how cool a community leaf collection would be. Maybe you should start a tradition!

Katya said...

Oh, man. I love it!

Katie said...

Alex - yes that is the one!