It’s that time of year when yellow leaves, or none, or few do hang upon the boughs where late the sweet birds sang. Now all but few are on the ground. My wife and I engage in an annual debate in many ways reminiscent of the Biden-Trump debacle.

At least we’re smart enough not to do it on TV.

She wants those leaves disappeared. I want to savor their beauty until it’s time to savor the beauty of snow.

The autumn leaves of New England are celebrated. Tourists come from afar to see the surrealism of it all. Media report the wave of color as it eases south. People grapple with the incomprehensibility of it all. They try to photograph the colors — a mountain of it or a single leaf with an impossible blend of orange and green — but such colors cannot be captured.

A sensitive few see beyond the sight of it. Fall comes with its own sweet, musty aroma. It comes with the sound of kids (me among them) scuffing through dry leaves just because they’re there. It comes with the utter silence of a leaf departing a twig way up there, just letting go and dancing downward to land without a sound.

Around here, September’s a month of blue skies over faint, warm hues of imminent change. October brings rain, pulling down the last of the stragglers and glistening the lollipop colors.

Later, frost edges the leaves with hairs of white. You can’t see it from indoors, and it doesn’t last long. You have to go outside early and look at it.

On the last day of this September, leaves on the lawn in question reflected the stress of drought. On one side, ruddy leaves of a maple covered the grass. On the other, it was the yellow leaves of a denuded black birch. Many trees around them were still as green as in July.

The deployment of the leaves was like orchestral music in that they told a story without meaning. The crimson leaves were dense around their mother maple but thinned as they stretched across the green and ochre grass. Across the way, the horde of yellow leaves reached reluctantly toward the maple. The grass lay like a valley between them.

I don’t know what the scene meant, but it was too perfect to mess with. I let it lie. I watched it as it changed: the leaves browning, blowing around, settling down.

By spring, most will be gone, blown to wherever it is that dead leaves go. They’ll be easier to rake in the spring, when it’s good to get outside and do something.

There’s really no need to mess with leaves now, no need to shriek them away with wind born of an internal combustion engine.

That’s what an aesthetically challenged homeowner half a mile away was doing on the last day of September. Yes, I could hear it from half a mile away, his noise scaring my leaves on my lawn.

Why would anyone want to make so much noise just to blow the beauty from a lawn?

Remember the rake? So quiet, just a swishing whisper of steel tines.

As you swished, you could hear birds and crickets. You could converse. You could think and not-think at the same time. It was exercise with a kind of open-air gym equipment, a kind of a back-scratcher for the yard.

One could dispense with the rake, too, by adopting a meadow instead of a lawn. A meadow is a garden that needs no gardener. Its beauty changes through the seasons, opening with dandelions and buttercups in the spring, then Queen Anne’s lace and black-eyed Susans all summer, then asters and goldenrod, the harbingers of fall.

I don’t know who decided that houses should be surrounded by monochromatic grass. I have a feeling the decision involved money. Keeping a lawn up to snuff requires the purchase of seed, fertilizer, pesticide, poisons, lime, trimmers, mowers, tractors, blowers, gasoline and oil.

It requires a lot of noise. It takes a lot of time.

Give me a Monet meadow any day. Give me a Klimt bed of birch leaves. Give me quiet. Give me peace. Give me summer, autumn, winter, spring.

Glenn Cheney is a writer, translator, and managing editor of New London Librarium. He can be reached at glenn@nllibrarium.com.