Fall has fallen upon us, bringing the changing of the seasons and colder weather with it. It’s finally time for sweaters, football, Dios de los Muertos, Halloween, capitalism, Thanksgiving and pumpkin spice lattes. And don’t forget the beautiful changing of the leaves.

The colors changing from greens to vibrant warm tones truly marks the season change. You can hardly be-leaf your eyes. Then change brings one last pop of color and vibrancy to the outdoors before winter makes the trees barren and snow covers the ground. With the beauty and fun stepping on crunchy leaves brings, what’s not to love?

A lot, apparently. While it’s pretty to look at, leaves are much easier to appreciate when they’re still attached to the trees. It’s natural that they fall to the ground, it is fall after all. And as said, you can step on them for a satisfying crunch, or jump in or run though giant piles of them, making them fly everywhere, so leaves on the ground aren’t boring by any means. But any other time, they’re really just in the way. 

When leaves fall, they don’t just fall in pretty little piles, they fall everywhere. On the grass, the sidewalks, in the gutters, on your cars, even on you. They’re everywhere and then you have to clean them up if you want to easily get around, which isn’t an easy task itself. Ask anyone who’s ever raked leaves before, it’s hard to be bent over, trying to pull leaves along with an oversized pitchfork or shovel, and you really build up a sweat. Just look around campus and you’ll find students using brooms and vacuums to get the leaves off their cars, only to find they’ve found their way inside, covering their car seats and filling their trunks.

Not to mention the weather interfering with clean up. The wind can blow your piles right over or just knock more leaves off trees. Fast winds have been creating mini leaf tornadoes all around campus, attacking students and burying them in the piles. Lately, half of Public Safety’s calls have been about students needing to be rescued from a leafy fate. Students can’t leave their dorms without worrying if their car is buried, or if they’ll get buried too! If it starts snowing or raining, you can be sure the leaves will stick to sidewalks, clump together, and get stuck on your shoes. They’ll even follow you inside your dorm; there’s no escape. Why can’t they just leaf us alone.

Around campus you even see the squirrels having a difficult time. Watching them dig through the leaves on the ground, going nuts looking for nuts, is admittedly pretty cute. But at the same time, it makes it much harder for them to scavenge when they have to get under everything. It’s a re-leaf that most of the trees have held onto their foliage, but we can certainly expect more barren branches and covered quads in the coming weeks.