The sound started low, the way bad things sometimes do, before announcing themselves fully. I was on the arm of the couch, not doing anything in particular, when I heard it — a flat, grinding roar from somewhere outside the house, rising and falling like something enormous clearing its throat. I have heard the vacuum. I have heard the garbage truck groan past on its morning route. This was neither of those. This was new, and new sounds get my full attention, because new sounds have, historically, turned out to mean something.
I went to the living room window the way I go to all crises — fast, low, and with my ears already flattened in anticipation of disappointment.
There was a man in the yard. I had never seen him before in my life. He wore an orange vest that caught the gray afternoon light in a way I did not like, and strapped across his chest and shoulders was some kind of machine, a long gray tube jutting out in front of him like he’d grown it. He was walking slowly along the edge of the grass, sweeping the tube back and forth, and everywhere the tube pointed, leaves jumped.
Not fell. Jumped. Whole drifts of them leapt sideways off the ground at once, spinning, and skittered ahead of him in a kind of frantic retreat. I had never seen leaves move like that before — with urgency, with what looked unmistakably like fear. I understood the fear completely. I was feeling quite a lot of it myself, from the safety of the glass.
I pressed closer to the window and made the low sound in my chest, the one that comes up on its own sometimes when I’m watching something I have no plan for. It did nothing. The man kept walking. The leaves kept fleeing. The roaring did not care in the slightest that I was there.
This is, I will admit, one of the more frustrating categories of threat — the kind that is clearly happening, clearly loud, clearly moving matter around in my own yard, and that has absolutely no idea I exist. At least the bird on the gutter once looked at me. This man never once glanced toward the window. He was entirely occupied with his leaves, his machine, his orange vest, his own private business that had nothing to do with me, and I found I did not know what to do with that. I paced the length of the windowsill. I sat. I stood again.
She came through at one point with a mug in her hand, glanced out past me, said something like “oh, they’re finally doing the yards,” in the mild voice she uses for things that don’t concern her, and kept walking toward the kitchen. I did not understand how she could be so unbothered. I decided she simply hadn’t gotten a good look at the machine.
The man worked his way along the fence line, gathering the fleeing leaves into a pile that grew taller than I expected a pile of leaves to get — a small brown-gold mountain building itself in the corner of the yard while I watched, powerless, from behind glass that I have never once resented more than I did in that hour. He’d push the pile a little further with the tube, step back, survey it the way I survey a job well done, and move on to the next stretch of grass.
Then something came apart in the pile. I saw it before I understood it — a sudden dark shape bursting sideways out of the leaf mountain and streaking across the yard low to the ground, too fast and too purposeful to be a leaf itself, gone into the bushes at the fence line before I could make sense of what I’d seen. A squirrel, I think, though I only caught the tail end of it, literally — a gray flick disappearing into the hedge. The man didn’t even look up. He kept walking his slow sweep, tube buzzing, entirely undisturbed by the fact that his leaf mountain had just ejected a live animal from somewhere inside it.
I stayed at the window a long time after that, watching the spot where the squirrel had vanished, in case it came back for a rematch, or in case the man’s pile produced anything else. It didn’t. The pile just sat there afterward, leaking a few leaves back out onto the grass whenever the wind caught it wrong, looking considerably less threatening now that I knew what had been hiding inside it.
The roaring went on for a long while — down the yard, back up it, around toward the side of the house where I lost sight of him entirely, the sound fading and then swelling again as he came back into view. I kept my post the whole time, even after my legs started to ache from standing at the glass, even after the light outside started going the flat gray color it goes before it gets properly dark this time of year.
Eventually the machine cut off mid-roar, the way it had started, abruptly, no warning. The silence afterward felt enormous. I watched the man unstrap the tube from his chest, sling it over one shoulder, and walk off toward a truck parked at the curb I hadn’t even noticed arriving. The leaf pile stayed exactly where he’d left it, slouching a little at one side where the wind had already started picking it apart.
I held my position at the window for a good while after the truck pulled away too, in case he’d forgotten something, or in case the pile tried anything. Nothing happened. The yard just sat there, leafless where he’d worked and untouched everywhere else, and somewhere out past the hedge a squirrel I’d never properly seen was presumably going about the rest of its afternoon as if none of this had happened to it at all.