There are few activities more suburban than climbing onto your roof with a leaf blower.
Somewhere, I imagine, the American Dream has this scene framed on a wall: tidy house, clean gutters, well-maintained yard, a Saturday productively spent. Responsible. Respectable. Successful.
I wish I could say I climbed the ladder with noble intentions.
The truth is, I had just finished Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Gathering Moss, one of the most unexpectedly beautiful books I have read in years. Kimmerer had awakened in me a tenderness toward moss—a patient, ancient community living close to the earth, asking almost nothing while giving so much. Moss became, in her hands, a teacher of humility, reciprocity, and belonging.
Which created a dilemma.
Because the moss on my roof had to go.
I confess I felt a twinge of betrayal every time the leaf blower scattered those tiny green civilizations into the yard below. I could almost hear Kimmerer whispering, “Look closer.” Instead, I reached for another extension cord.
Straddling the ridge of the roof, leaf blower humming in my hands, another image kept interrupting my thoughts: Pieter Bruegel’s Landscape with the Fall of Icarus.
Not Icarus himself, of course. Bruegel almost hides him. Just two legs disappearing beneath the sea while everyone else keeps going. The plowman continues his work. The shepherd watches the clouds. The ship sails on.
W. H. Auden noticed what so many of us miss:
“…everything turns away
Quite leisurely from the disaster…”
William Carlos Williams saw the same thing:
“…a splash quite unnoticed…”
I found myself laughing at the absurdity.
What if I slipped?
What if I flew just a little too close to the American Dream—roof maintained, gutters pristine, home ownership carefully preserved—and tumbled into the rhododendrons below, leaf blower still clutched heroically in my hand?
Would anyone notice?
The woman walking her dog might hear the blower fall silent. A neighbor might glance up. Someone driving the busy road behind our house might slow for a moment before continuing on. They might wonder if I was okay. They might assume I was taking a break. They might not think of me at all.
After all, in suburbia everyone has somewhere to be.
Everything turns away, quite leisurely. The strange thing is that I don’t think my fear was really about falling. It was about disappearing.
About becoming one more unnoticed casualty of a culture that quietly trains us to earn our worth through productivity, maintenance, and achievement. Keep the roof clean. Keep the yard respectable. Keep yourself together. Just keep going.
Perhaps I’ve spent more of my life than I realize flying toward that sun.
Bruegel’s painting doesn’t condemn the plowman; he still has fields to tend. The ship still has a destination. Life cannot stop every time someone falls.
Yet I couldn’t shake the question. Not whether someone would eventually notice. But whether anyone would be interrupted. Whether my fall would matter enough for someone to stop.
And maybe Kimmerer’s moss has one last lesson after all.
Moss never climbs very high. It spreads low, close to the ground, often taking root in wounds, patiently weaving communities of astonishing resilience. It flourishes not through competition but through relationship. It belongs because it participates.
Perhaps that’s the better dream… learning to stay close enough to the earth—and to one another—that no one’s fall goes unnoticed.
Peace, dwight
