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Enterprising neighbor
My former absentee landlord neighbor is now my neighbor again. He kicked his tenants out and moved back into his house the weekend before Thanksgiving. His former wife lives about 5 doors up the street. From his kids’ perspective, this probably is the better arrangement than having Daddy live two towns away as he had been for a while. They’re over here quite often now. In any case, he’s baaack.
About an hour and a half ago, he pulled into his driveway in a strange van and suddenly a bunch of kids piled out—three boys and two girls. They extracted rakes from the back the of van and began raking leaves out of my neighbor’s yard. By the looks of things, they were not enthused. Kind of makes one speculate what that was all about. Community service? Raking leaves during study hall in lieu of detention (he’s a teacher)? It was an odd sight. Worked out kind of nicely for my neighbor, though. His yard is a completely deleafed and very tidy looking now. It made me laugh a bit, too. That’s one way to get your yard raked.
Exploitation of child labor, he sniffed.
Beats a leaf blower any day, though.
Oh, definitely better than a leaf blower. 
One of these days, when I see him outside, I’ll have to ask. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if this was a detention alternative. From previous conversations, I do know that he thinks detention is an enormous waste of time for the kids and the teachers who get stuck with detention duty on a rotating basis. This would be a project/experiment very much in keeping with his somewhat unorthodox ideas. More power to him if that’s what it was all about. He’s really good with kids.