Thursday, November 19, 2009

Blowing Away the Beauty in the Plaza

This old boy's blowing away one of the prettiest views in the Roanoke Valley^

In a Nov. 3 blog, I promised you a beautiful fall scene on the plaza in front of Fire Station No. 1, as soon as the leaves started falling off the Ginkgo trees. I've waited until now to follow that up with the "Hey! Get down there and look at it" entry because it wasn't ready yet. The leaves seemed to be falling, but my guess that the wind was blowing them away.

As you can see from the photo above, it's not God who's depriving you of one of the prettiest sights in the Roanoke Valley every year; it is the City of Roanoke, blowing the leaves off the brick walkway and wasting all that beauty. With the leaves in place, we have a golden carpet leading to the fire station. With them blown away, we have what we have all the time. A nice little courtyard with a bunch of people sitting at tables smoking cigarettes.

The guy doing the blowing didn't want me to take his picture and I suspect he'd seen the leaves as a carpet in the past and knew exactly what he was doing to this little spot of specialness. But it's his job, so we can't blame him.

Too bad, though, that the city, in all its efficiency, doesn't have a little space in there for a speck of rare beauty.

3 comments:

  1. This might sound a bit silly, but doesn't anyone use a broom anymore? That's one of my pet peeves - small gas engines on folks' backs pumping noise and fumes into the air. Seems a bit overkill sometimes.en

    ReplyDelete
  2. Pyranoir: Great point. And I'm guilty of raking leaves into a pile so I can crank up the leaf vacuum, suck them up, mulch them and spread them on my "natural" backyard area.

    ReplyDelete
  3. I can't tell you how many times I've seen a City employee chasing five leaves down the sidewalk with a blower and probably burning a quart of gas in the process.

    ReplyDelete