I think I need to find a long-time New Englander and put to him a question that keeps recurring: what’s the deal with leaves? Is it just a New England thing? Or a New Hampshire thing?

If you live in this region, you probably know already what I’m asking about. But here’s what’s happened and left this transplant from the South wondering. First, the fall leaf colors everywhere we looked were genuinely spectacular even when they weren’t quite. Those red maples, the golds, oranges and browns were darned dazzling, as I’ve written about before. We came to love the leaves and to understand why everyone who lives here (and those who come from miles away to see them every fall) feel much the same way.

Sometime around mid-October, with the colors starting to fade a bit, we examined our large yard, now partially covered by leaves, chatted with our neighbor Nate about getting them cleaned up, and decided to wait a few weeks until they had all fallen to the ground. This seemed perfectly sensible to me. In early November, we checked with Nate again and agreed we’d wait a little longer to give all of the leaves their opportunity to drop off.

A few days ago Nate said it appeared to be time. We looked at the trees and agreed; practically bare. So with a flourish, Nate and a friend covered the yard with their blowers and cleaned out every single leaf. The yard was immaculate. And we were secure in the newly acquired knowledge that we were masters of our domain.

And then we woke up this morning after a couple of windy days and discovered all those naked trees had miraculously produced leaves during the night and allowed them to fall all over our yard. Seriously. All over the yard that had been grassy nude. There were no leaves on the trees 48 hours ago, so where did these impostors come from? I called Nate with puzzlement in my voice. Does this happen all the time, I wondered? Nate, calmly, replied that this was, after all, New England, and you never can tell about the weather. Or, apparently, the leaves. I glanced upward for the fifth time in the morning; the tree limbs were as bald as my tire tread. Nate offered to come blow them again. I turned him down. That would be admitting defeat, that I didn’t know as much about New England as I thought I did. I’m not ready to go there yet. Instead, I’m going to wait cheerfully for the first serious snow which will cover those damned leaves, and I’ll forget all about them until spring. That ought to give me a little time to consider my tire tread.