The Ins

Brought to you by a day so beautiful I can hardly stand it.

It's about 55 degrees out here on the deck as I sit blogging. The sky is that perfect autumn blue, the color and softness of your oldest, most favorite jeans. The air smells of fallen leaves, wood smoke, and the pumpkin dessert baking just inside the kitchen door. The cats have gathered at my feet, tired from a morning of stalking bunnies but unwilling to retreat to the couch just yet. It's been a glorious week, with another to come, and I can't stop smiling.

Today I finally got off my vacationing keister and did my autumn yard work. I buddied up to O Toro, my mulching mower (not to be confused with Snow Toro, my snow blower) for a few trips around the yard. Last year for some reason I suffered a bout of extreme stupidity and did not take advantage of all of O Toro's features, opting instead to rake and bag leaves by hand. (Actually, I opted first to let some enterprising neighborhood kids do it for me, but they worked for about 45 minutes one evening, accomplished little, and never returned.) I don't know what, if anything, I might have been thinking.

This fall, however, I closed off the side clipping chute and attached the mulch bag instead. After that, the chore was much like any other mowing job, except for stopping every 15 minutes or so to empty the mulch bag into a Hefty. Instead of filling (and paying for haulage of) a dozen or more trash bags full of partially compacted leaves collected over the course of several days and several blisters, I now have just three full of finely diced clippings. I'll make another pass next weekend and be done with it. Sure, I stirred up enough leaf dandruff and dirt that I'll be sneezing mud for the next couple days, but it was worth it. The yard looks like it's been vacuumed, and will for another hour or so until the remaining leaves drop from the trees.

During my travels around and around the Acreage, I had time to think. Always a dangerous situation, I know. Anyway, I got to thinking about bagging leaves and about human beings' general propensity for putting things into other things. The leaves go into the mower bag, then are transferred to a garbage bag. The bags are put into a garbage truck and hauled away to a landfill, where they're put back in the ground. But those leaves, those products of nature, have to be in something at all times, or they bother us.

So it goes indoors as well. The house is not clean until the clothes are in the laundry basket or closet or drawer, the dishes are in the dishwasher or cupboard, the books are in the bookcase, the CDs are in the CD rack, the knickknacks are in their knicknooks, the dust is in a Swiffer sheet in the garbage, the seasonal decorations are in their Rubbermaid containers in the basement or furnace room or attic. Even I am not socially acceptable (in most situations) until I am in some clothes.

And the same stricture applies to things we buy. If I want Coke, I have to buy it in a can, several cans packaged in a 12-pack, which the Byerly's cashier then puts in a grocery bag so another employee can load it in my car so I can take it home and carry it in the house and stash it in the fridge. The gum I buy: each stick is wrapped in foil, which is wrapped in a white paper band, which is in an individual wrapper with the brand logo on it, and the sticks are in a larger pack. I put the pack of gum and a bunch of other things — my Treo in its protective case, my reading glasses in theirs — in my purse to carry them around with me. And on and on like that.

What's up with all the in? I know it's human nature to sort things into categories: things we eat, things we do, things that are dangerous, things that are purple. Every language has ways of doing this. But apparently it's not enough to sort and compartmentalize mentally; we have to do it physically as well.

And we've clearly decided that in means good and out means bad: in favor or in fashion or in bounds, as opposed to out. The in crowd is the desired crowd; the outcasts are not who you want to hang around with. On a good day, I'm in luck, in the money, just in time.

Or wait, maybe in is bad: indecent, incompetent, infuriating. Don't you just love English? Incomparable.

Anyway. I could drive myself insane if I spend too much more time inquiring into this matter. Instead, I think I'll sit outside for a bit longer and read a bit more. I don't need an answer or even want one. Just an excuse to ask.

Today around the world: October 28 is OHI Day in Greece and Cyprus.