Piles of Leaves. Everywhere.

I don't understand. Does this sort of thing go on in other places? Leaf pick-up was scheduled for November 18th, so naturally, people raked and deposited their leaves in the street around November 8th.

All over town, streets looked like this. What was super awesome, however, was when it rained. The leaves were soaked down, and at the points where the piles extended too far into the street, they had been driven over countless times, producing a leafy goo that caused each and every car to hydroplane.

So that was fun.

The Focus was stuck parking in front of the neighbor's house because some jerkass had been parked in front of my house for a week straight with no sign of relief. So my landlord? Had it ticketed. Not a day too soon, though, as the magic happened the very next day.

Nice green lawns and leaf-littered streets.
Welcome to Ann Arbor.

But seriously now. Growing up, we raked our leaves ourselves. We bagged them ourselves. And we put them in special canisters marked "YARD WASTE." And someone picked them up and we worried no more. In Ann Arbor, we have a truck that sucks them up off of the street into a tank that is apparently much like Mary Poppins's carpetbag.

I don't know what happens from here. Are the leaves burned? Are they dumped in a ravine? Are they reintroduced to the wild?

They're gone now, which is nice. Except of course, for the places where the sucky truck couldn't get to: i.e., where moron cars were parked. Most streets still have errant piles of rain-soaked leaves and wide-open expanses of, well, pavement.