The two warriors arrived on the battlefield at high noon.

They were fully armed, uniformed for battle, grim faced, and determined. They wore similar helmets, goggles, respirators, and sophisticated sound-cancelling headphones. They held their ominous weapons at port arms. The neighborhood was enveloped in an eerie silence as they stared each other down. Their long-standing feud was about to be settled.

The silence was shattered as the weapons were simultaneously discharged. The sky filled with thick black smoke and the acrid smell of fuel exhaust.

The leaf-blower war had begun.    

The combatants were suddenly bathed in swirling masses of dried autumn leaves. Onlookers dove for cover behind trees, garbage cans, cars parked on the street, and each other.

Both fighters employed high-level tactics. Rather than maintaining a constant level of blowing, they randomly varied its duration and intensity. This inflicted the maximum level of psychological damage–the intermittently waning intensity and pauses created the false hope that the noxious ruckus was about to end.

So it went on for the better part of the day, the tortuous whining whipping the ears and psyches of the combatants, and anyone around who wasn’t already stone deaf.

As the last drops of gasoline were being sucked into the engines, the blowers began to cough and sputter. Mercifully, peace was restored to the neighborhood just as police arrived, in response to multiple 911 calls.

By eyeball the leaf count was dead even. Each fighter had blown the same number of leaves onto the other one’s lawn. They stood for a long time surveying the battlefield. After an almost imperceptible nodding of helmets, they shouldered their weapons, and retreated into their respective homes.

A peacekeeping mission, summoned by the HOA-Board President, arrived the following day. Drawing on ancient methods, they raked the battled-over leaves into piles and transported them to the closest composting pile. The Board hastily passed a resolution banning leaf-blower battles and enacted a hefty fine for violations of this rule.

The warriors had agreed to escalate to this level of confrontation after years of more minor skirmishes, fueled by their shared obsession to keep their lawns, and the sidewalks that bordered them, leafless. It was a zero-sum game, as the dead foliage exiled from one lawn invariably ended up on the other lawn.  If alternatives to war had been considered prior to the big battle, they had not been acted on.

The combatants had one thing in common–their disdain for more environmentally-minded neighbors who employed electric leaf blowers or rakes. The combatants referred to them as “foliage wimps.”  The “You don’t bring a knife to a gun fight” metaphor was asserted by one combatant (a Chicago native). “It’s not just about aesthetics,” said the other combatant, “someone could break their neck on one of those things” (a leaf that is). That opinion was unsupported by any documented incidents of injury or death caused by fallen leaves.

The leaf-blower-battle ban proved effective. The combatants still used their gas-powered leaf blowers, but they only blew the leaves into the street, rather than onto each other’s lawns. Then one day, one combatant bought a snow blower…