So! The election is over, our government is once more a two-party system, and, by all accounts, life should be settling down and getting calmer. I should be getting more done, since, after all, the national suspense is over. My little email jingle isn’t ringing five times a day with political messages–Move On needing me to make phone calls to voters in South Dakota or to host a party of cell-phone users; John Kerry and Howard Dean have stopped writing to beg for my dollars. Even the telephone doesn’t ring as much now that  the robot population has quit calling every few minutes urging us all to vote, vote, vote.

So what do you think is keeping life from being the paradise on earth it should be? It’s the leaf blowers. They are now out in force, in a late-fall show of strength, and the air around us is filled with the squealing, whining equivalent of 500 dental drills.

These leaf blowers have made us crazy in my house, me and the dog. My husband is pretty much away from the house during the ten leaf-blowing hours of the day, so he doesn’t know why he comes home to raving lunatics. Jordie the golden retriever and I  have frankly found ourselves losing our grip on reality here at the home.

Jordie, I notice, is now forced to nap during the day with his paws over his ears, which does not look one bit comfortable. Bad as that is, though, it’s worse for him when he’s awake. He prowls around the house, looking for something, and I think I know what he wants–doggie ear plugs.

Since we don’t have any of those, he has taken to a life of crime: stealing dish towels from the kitchen counter. These aren’t just any old laundered dish towels, which would be bad enough; these are dish towels that are sprinkled with flour and are draped over the bread dough I’ve made each day and put on the counter to rise. 

He has so far taken three of them right off the bread–carrying them quickly away, head down, until he can get them off in private to have his way with them. If he sees me coming, following the floury trail, he tries to hide the towel underneath him so that I won’t see what he’s really doing–bunching it into a ball and then licking it. I thought at first this was one of his classic mother-dog issues left over from puppyhood, but now I think he’s trying to figure out how he can make a primitive dish towel ear plug.

I’m beginning to understand that the sound of a neighborhood-full of  leaf-blowers going on hour after hour can lead one to a life of criminal activity. Just today, for instance, I was writing my novel, humming along so I wouldn’t go insane from the noise outside, and I had gotten myself all the way to page 80, when suddenly, without any warning whatsoever, the main character, Kathryn, pulled a gun on the other main character.

A gun! I didn’t even know she had access to a gun, so I can’t tell you how distressing this is. This was nowhere mentioned in the outline of the book that I sent to the publisher! They will be so stunned when they hear that Kathryn was capable of such a heinous act.

I know what you’re thinking. The dog was thinking this, too. I should just take it out. Use the delete key. But once I wrote it down, I could see that it worked. It was actually the right thing for her to do. She had to do it. Still, she’s very sorry, and I am, too. It’s going to make it that much harder to get her to the point of falling in love with the character she’s now threatening to kill, hundreds of pages from now.

But I won’t get to that writing the part of the love affair until springtime most likely. By then, the leaf blowers will be put away–and maybe people can make nice to each other. If this book drags on until next fall, though…well, it may turn out to be a murder mystery. I can just see her really using that gun on him and then having to bury his body in a pile of leaves–and he won’t get found until somebody tries to suck up his body with the leaf machine.