by Stephanie Minteer
We did not get the early season snowstorm,
so was it national news or overtime envy
that pushed Public Works to be out
in their front-end loaders and dump trucks
to pick up leaves, piles and piles of them—
oak, maple, elm, and ash—along the boulevards,
heavy equipment at the ready
to round them up, hoist them high,
fill twenty-five ton 18-wheelers to the brim,
haul them off into bigger piles somewhere secret,
to wait for a big wind to gather them up again,
blow them back home.
This poem first appeared in the Winter 2016 issue of New England Memories.
Stephanie Minteer was born and raised in the frozen Northland of Minnesota. She was hired right out of university to teach in a New Hampshire “supervisory union” for a year and returned in the mid-seventies for good. She has been a ski racer, a paraoptometric assistant, a children’s librarian, and a Spanish teacher. Winter sports, hiking, kayaking, travel, and reading are her favorite pastimes.
John Van Besien lives in Peterborough, New Hampshire, where he runs his photography studio, John Van Besien Portraits.
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