Autumn is here, the green leaves of summer are turning into multiple colors of orange and brown. Slowly, the wind will lift the dead stems of the leaves from the trees, and leaves will fly through the air, rafting up on streets and driveways. In this modern age of lawn care, there are leaf blowers to help you control falling leaves.
There was a time, not that many years ago, when lawns were only found in the ritzy sections of the city. At the many farm homes, usually built within a grove of trees, and in the less affluent residential areas of the city, people swept their yards. You raked and swept your yards, piling the leaves in large piles. In the country side, to put in the fields for fertilizers...in the city to be hauled off by a street department to be wasted in some way. Often in the countryside, large piles of leaves would be burned, it was such a wonderful aroma, the very essence of the autumn smell. On our farm, we took large baskets of leaves to the mule and cow stables, and the hog barns, the leaves could be used to give animals warmth in winter, and slowly become fertilizer.
The leaves in the woods which fell from the trees went back into the rich soil of the woodlands. The rich humus (or compost) from the woods was used in potted pants and flower beds. In other words, as was intended from the very beginning, production always leads to reproduction. The rich chemical nutrition produced from well-rooted plants and trees, dies in order to live again, such is the life cycle, flora and fauna.
In this throwaway society and culture, even grass clippings are not put in a compost pile. There is much talk of organic gardening, organic farming, using natural compost instead of artificial fertilizer, but those who do most of the talking do less of the walking. My father knew more about organic farming, soil conservation, agronomy, animal husbandry, and the other big words taught at the agricultural college, than anything known or promoted by the local, and state agriculture agents and “specialists”.
They would come by to look at the beauty of his crops, marvel at his farming skills, his production ability, farming can be as rewarding a vocation as any, tragedy that the farming vocations have been destroyed by liberal efforts at big-time, collectivist, communist doctrines of big government and big farms. My father's farms, his ancestors before him, supported many families, families who today sit in housing projects, disinterested in the green leaves of plants, only interested in a green government welfare check.
On many continents, industrious, working people still depend on the leaves of plants, in Sri Lanka, you can see people filling large sacks by picking tea leaves on large tea plantations, in Central and South America you find people filling bags with cocoa beans, and vanilla beans. In some places, particularly South America, you find working people filling sacks with coffee beans. Those who have visited Machu Picchu, and other South American historical places of interest, will remember the natives in their white straw hats, always a coca leaf in the mouth, about as addictive as tobacco, that comes from leaves of tobacco plants.
I was reared on an eastern North Carolina tobacco farm, where tobacco plants were transplanted into tobacco fields, where large stalks of tobacco leaves were grown. These large, sticky, gummy, tobacco leaves were strung on sticks and cured by heat, the leaves were bundled and sold at auction, great tobacco fortunes, such as the Duke and Rentals fortunes were made from addicting the world to the smoking, chewing, and dipping of these leaves through smoking tobacco, chewing tobacco and snuff.
All this addiction, all this money, all these jobs, from the leaves of plants, now, all this tobacco activity has moved to communist China. Just as the jobs from another leaf plant, cotton, providing an entire industry of jobs through textile mills have moved to other countries. The cotton plant, a very tough weed, produced in its fiber, cotton seed. The seed, as with all seed, in the ground, produced a plant, a plant capable of producing fiber which could cloth the world.
Great textile plants, great job opportunities, all now moved oversees. There were more industrial jobs in America in 1950 than there are today. Since the year 2000, 6.6 million jobs have been lost in America, jobs transferred oversees. Silly, brainless, liberal politicians thought Americans could survive on just investing their wealth. We are now ending the summer of recovery from our great depression, about to enter a bleak winter of despair. Obama and Biden, in spite of their rhetoric, in spite of their continued bail-outs, are witnessing the demise of American industry, American jobs. Only working people, people with jobs, can pay taxes toward a recovery, the senseless hiring of government workers further bleeds the already broke economy. As ridiculous as replacing knowledge on the “leaves” in textbooks, by pornography images on the “leaves” of magazines, is the falling failure-leaves of jobs, leaving the nation, never to return. Suicide is always unforgivable and unregainble with a person, and certainly with a nation.
In this area, where I live, there was a time when industrious, hard-working, god-fearing people enjoyed their jobs of cultivating leaves...large farms of flowering plants, large farms of plants producing strawberries, blueberries. There was a time when fruit trees, with beautiful limbs, beautiful leaves, produced peaches, apples, plumbs, cherries, pears; now, like the flowers that now come from South America, the fruits which now come from Asia, more and more the apple orchards which were once a great source of jobs, maple trees which were at one time a great sources of jobs (syrup), pines trees which at one time were at one time a great source of jobs (turpentine, tar, lumber), tobacco, cotton, peanuts, and many other jobs from plants and plant leaves, are now a memory here but a reality there.
Through leaves, the marvelous botany of leaves, God furnished mankind with every food source and medicine source he would need on earth for existence. All these sources provided jobs, it is so easy to confuse intelligence with expedience as we have dabbled in genetic engineering and synthetic production of fakes.
“I think that I should never see,
a poem as lovely as a tree”
- Joyce Kilmer
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