I stomped around my yard, autumn leaves crunching beneath my feet.
It was late October, so there was a good amount out there. I knew I was going to have to deal with this mess, but I really, really didn’t want to. I started to think maybe the leaves could do some good. I know I see squirrels and blue jays all over around here, so I thought maybe piling them all up and just leaving them there would be a good thing and save me from hours of bagging. What can I say, I’m lazy.
I signed up for Nextdoor a few years back after we moved into this house, and it just seemed like a cool way to connect with neighbors around us. At first, it really was, there were cool discussions about local events that were just not available online anywhere else, unless you knew that specific Facebook group, or is it a page now? If you use Nextdoor today, you know that it’s just a slew of Missing/Found Dog posts and people trying to sell you something. But I know every now and then a gem of a post hits the site, and leaves have got to be something every homeowner has to deal with, so I headed inside and loaded up the site and did a quick search.
Sure enough, yup, mundane posts about lost pets (didn’t even search for this, come on…), people trying to sell their lawn services, and spam. I scrolled for a bit but didn’t see anything interesting until I noticed there was one of those hashtag tags labeled “#leavetheleaves”. I clicked this, which brought me to a single, locked post, titled “Look at this eyesore, why would anyone keep leaves in their yard!?”
What can I say? I love drama, and this might actually lead me somewhere helpful, so I clicked the post. The page loaded to a post not found message.
Great. The only relevant post is gone. Luckily, I had just run into this issue. I had recently used the Wayback Machine to find an old webpage I had stored on my old university servers, way back in 2006, which I was amazed it archived. I grabbed what the post’s URL should have been and tossed it into the machine. After the dial-up reminiscent slow load time, the page loaded, and had indeed been archived! And it looked like everything was loading just fine, images and all, up to the point that a Nextdoor moderator locked the thread, which we’ll get to.
Fantastic, let’s see if there’s anything helpful here, I thought to myself. To his credit, the poster, Mark L., wasn’t exactly wrong to complain. His photo at the top of the page showed a towering mound of leaves, a good 4 or 5 feet tall, all along the fence of his neighbor’s property. I had to enlarge the photo to even be able to tell it wasn’t just a hill.
You could just tell Mark was frustrated with his words, like this gem: “Looks like you’re not just lazy, you’re cultivating a landfill in your yard.”
I don’t need to get into the nitty-gritty of the post, but after the usual posts of people complaining about Mark invading his neighbor’s privacy, somehow people argued on both sides of the fence. I couldn’t agree with anyone saying the neighbor was fine for leaving this monstrosity out there; it was that bad. But after a few days, a post came back from a poster named Frank A. As it turns out, Frank is the neighbor of Mark, indeed the one with the leaf pile.
Frank came into the post with a pretty humble apology. Frank cited off some ecological benefits of leaving the leaves, like being able to use the fertile soil to enhance the flavors of his wife’s baked goods for community events. He ended his post with the hashtag #LeaveTheLeaves, which is how I found the post to begin with.
Maybe the cakes and cookies she made were that good, because out of nowhere, Mark turned around. He apologized back to Frank, indicating he had been through a horrible week, and it was just the last straw. Looking back, he understood that he overreacted and should have just gone across the yard and talked to him. It appeared that Mark just decided to let the whole frustration go, and to my surprise, built his own leaf pile. Mark’s pile was nowhere near the size of Frank’s, but it was obvious the two were going to try to get along. Frank quipped back it looked great and gave some advice; from a confrontation perspective, it looked done.
Months go by in the thread of people sharing leaf pile tips, photos, advice. Mark and Frank even had photos together. They seemed to be getting along quite well, and it seemed like a cool little group of people.
I don’t know what the hell changed, but out of nowhere, Mark comes back into the thread late one night with a bone to pick. He called Frank out publicly in the post once more, this time threatening to call the city if the leaves weren’t gone by the following day. Frank left one more post, simply stating, “Ok. Still suggest you #leavetheleaves.” Both Mark and Frank disappear from this thread at this point.
There are two posts that end the thread. A news article with over 300 of those shocked emoji faces and a moderator post simply stating: “This post has been locked by a moderator. Further comments are not permitted.”
The news article though, it’s a bit morbid… as it would turn out, that following morning, an anonymous tip was left at the local police department. I couldn’t find what the tip was, but it led the police to Mark’s house, specifically his leaf pile. They showed up around 11 am that morning, and Mark was arrested by 11:05 am. The article states that the leg of an unidentified woman was found in the leaf pile, as well as a bloodied bandsaw in Mark’s shed, and was pretty much open and shut from what I read.
This was all way too interesting to me, so I wanted to reach out to some of these people in the thread, figure out if anyone knew anything, maybe develop a story. A story, it’s all I wanted to write. I sent a few messages to a few accounts in the thread, made a post asking if anyone knew anything about this story, if anyone knew where Frank ended up, just general information gathering.
I guess the reason I’m writing THIS story; I made those posts and messages months ago. Literally no one responded to the post so I had forgotten all about it. This morning, I was doing my normal rounds in the yard and now I’ve got a nice leaf pile going. I’ve been using the soil to make some fantastic veggies in our garden. Nothing like what Frank had in his yard, but it was cozy and brought some fun wildlife. As I approached my own leaf pile, I could see a folded piece of paper on the fence. Figured it was just some trash someone left, so I walked over and grabbed it.
I opened it up, and scrawled inside was a note:
“Loved your post. I suggest you #leavetheleaves.”
Tom E. F.