Me vs. the Pine Tree Monsters

It sounds like some grade B horror movie, but the story is real and the battle has lasted a lifetime.

I see them out there, swaying in the September breeze all green and happy dreaming dreams of chlorophyll tinged glory just waiting for the day they turn brown and ruin my day. Soon they will cover everything in sight and my summer lawn will be covered in pine needles. I can almost hear them cackling in anticipation. They and their buddies, the pine cones are about to bombard my roof, driveway and yard. Soon it will look as bad as it did the day after Irma paid us a visit. The difference is that Irma gave us more branches and green limbs.

In fact, the early birds of the pine needle bunch are already falling on the hood and roof of my car, sliding down the windshield and collecting in the windshield wiper gutter. Every morning, before heading out for the adventures of the day, I have to spend a minute or two picking needles off the car. Then as I gain some speed down the road, run the windshield wiper a few sweeps to clear the rest. Invariably, one or two needles manage to wedge themselves between the blade and the glass. From that vantage point they wave and rattle in the wind stream just to annoy me all the way downtown. I can’t wait to get to the parking garage and rip those suckers out from under the blade and toss them into the nearby garbage can.

Even as a kid, pine trees were creating a lot of work for me. The big difference was that instead of the short needles we have up here, the ones down there were long, really long. Those puppies averaged around 10 to 12 inches long instead of the usual 4 to 6 inches we see up here. We learned to braid those needles and even tried to make baskets out of them. Tried, but never succeeded. Once the pine needle fall began in late September, every weekend would find me rake in hand gathering those needles together into a pile. Back in those days we could burn trash in our yard. One match was all that was needed. Those dry needles were gone in a flash of fire and a puff of white smoke. Fall days had a familiar smoky - piney odor rising from all those brown piles of needles in all the yards. Sure can’t do that today!

I had a respite from the pine needle menace from 1963 until 1970 while I was in college and starting my career. That was long enough for me to forget all about pine needles when we moved into our current home on Saint Patrick’s Day in 1970. A contributing factor was that there were no pine tree needles falling during the winter and spring months of the house search.

Sure enough, one morning that fall, I stepped out onto the front porch and had a palm plant moment. There were needles everywhere; short little ugly pine needles. All that lovely shade that was enjoyed over the summer came with a terrible price; there were 75 pine trees in our lot and all but one loved to drop pine needles and cones on me. I quickly learned that a yard full of pine needles weighed a lot more than those from a single tree and that short needles were harder to rake than the long needled variety that I had grown up with.

So I spent most Saturday afternoons in the yard with a rake in my hands and a transistor radio propped up against a tree, listening to Bob Fulton do play by play for the South Carolina Gamecocks. I almost started enjoying that time. I said almost! Yes I did! In ’76 when I became chief engineer of WIS Radio, there was a dramatic change in my Saturday afternoons. Instead of raking leaves listening to the game, I was in the broadcast booth at Williams – Brice Stadium engineering and producing the game for the Gamecock Football Network; trying to get Bob to take that cue for the station ID’s. Thanks to the help of our color announcer, Tommy Suggs, together we could get Bob’s attention long enough for the 15 second, FCC required ID. Yeah, MAN! Eating fried chicken and potato salad in the press box high above a completely leafless gridiron was definitely more fun that raking pine needles.

The 80s brought on busier times for me and the pine needle Saturdays became bi-weekly affairs. Over the years, labor saving devices such as leaf blowers and lawn tractors came into play. I particularly liked the tractor. I set it up for mulching and ground those evil needles to a fine dust that would provide fertilizer for the next spring. Add to that the extra benefit of clipping the tips off of dormant grass to create the glorious odor of a newly mowed lawn. The hardest part of the day became climbing up on the roof to blow off pine needles.

These days I have it down to an art. When the pine trees do their thing, I whip out my smart phone and speak the magic words into it “Call Yard Guy!” Life is good! Oh MY!