Falling down: A story of the times
Sunday, 17 May 2026
Mike White is a senior writer and columnist.
OPINION: Mike the courier driver stood in our driveway, contemplating.
His van was idling behind him, and he’d already handed over my parcel, but he was taking his time thinking about the issue at hand.
The issue I’d raised was the carpet of leaves he’d driven over as he neared our house, a carpet thick and vast, created by a lofty golden elm and silver birch.
“I suppose I should get on and sweep them up and get rid of them,” I said, flailing an optimistic hand towards the property’s edges as likely places I could dump them.
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Mike mused over this, rolling through options in his head.
“Well, you could just get a leaf blower,” he eventually said, “and blow them down the drive and into the neighbour’s.”
He was joking. Well, the bit about the neighbour’s place, anyway. But blowing them was what a lot of people would resort to, I knew.
I’ve never understood leaf blowers, and Mike turned out to be a cynic too: You just blow them from one place to another. It hardly solves the problem.
We shook our heads, looked at the mountain of leaves, and Mike pulled himself back into the van and reversed over them, as he headed back down the driveway
Funnily enough, there is a leaf blower in our garden shed, but I’ve never fired it up, because I’ve never really fancied spending hours herding leaves around the lawn and house, and ending up with the same pile, just somewhere else.
Instead, I’ve always used rakes of various designs, and trundled heaped mounds off to the compost with the wheelbarrow.
But then, at the weekend, I was making coffee and saw the neighbours out early dealing to the leaves on their back lawn. They have a huge oak tree, and it suddenly shed its summer cloak over a few days, revealing the mountains behind it that we’d not seen for months.
The neighbours had it down pat. They laid a large blue tarpaulin on the lawn, raked the leaves on to it, then grabbed the tarp’s corners and humped it off to dump in a corner under the trees.
Spurred on by the enthusiastic barks of their dog, they were done in no time. I’d barely finished making my partner’s coffee and they were packing up, making me realise this was a much more efficient process than endless wheelbarrow trips.
So, the following afternoon I grabbed our blue tarp, set it under the walnut tree, and set to raking up the layers of leaves that had fallen in the last fortnight.
Before long I’d lugged everything to our compost heap, depositing a blanket of imminent organic decay.
We have two walnut trees, and I think they’re fantastic.
Growing up, we had one in our backyard, and I thought it was convenient.
Not only did it often prevent the ball I’d slogged playing backyard cricket from sailing into the neighbour’s paddock, but it was a source of income.
A man with a plan used to get me to crack and shell our walnuts, for which he paid me whatever the going provincial child labour rate was. He no doubt then sold them for some inflated markup to daring cooks attempting daring novelties from an Alison Holst cookbook.
But I had to be quick - our dog at the time had daring tastes and a dextrous mouth, and could crack the shells and eat the nuts if I was distracted.
Last year, our walnut trees got wiped out by a late frost, and we gathered not a single shell or nut.
But this year has been a bonanza. For weeks I’ve been stooping under the trees, scooping up nuts. Even now, with the tree almost entirely denuded, there are a few yet to slip their skins and leap from the highest branches.
The neighbouring apple trees still have their leaves, but the fruit is thinning as weakling windfalls drop, and tūī have merrily plundered many more. We happily sacrifice them, though, for the wonderful birdsong. I like to think of it as a tūī tithing.
Despite any piffling trifles, I love autumn.
It’s all about falling. Falling temperatures. Falling last fruit. Falling leaves.
And as compensation for being the harbinger of winter’s woes, autumn provides that incredible spectacle of colour, as if summer is blazing out like a meteor streaking to earth.
The reds and yellows and oranges rival a Resene catalogue.
But as I stood there, rake in hand, and watched last leaves caught on the breeze and spun to the ground, and thought, gosh, we’re almost into winter, I noticed a fleck of yellow beside my gumboot that was too bright to be a leaf.
And indeed it was, a bulb bravely pushing skyward from the soil, perhaps getting ahead of itself, but a reminder that when everything seems to be falling down, something is always coming up.