Two of my three big maples are almost bare now, and the third --the one out front, my favourite--is letting fly. I love my trees, except for a brief period in late October when I have to clean up after them. It's not a minor matter. They drop enough leaves to fill a small boxcar--far too many to bag, and burning is both illegal and Environmentally Unsound (although I do plan to sneak one small leaf-fire, on the grounds that no child should be deprived of the smell of a leaf fire). I don't have a mulcher, and I can't compost this much vegetation. I do fill some garbage bags with leaves and use those to insulate a chilly bit of basement wall, but that still leaves, oht maybe 20 cubic yards or more... So what we do is to rake the leaves into a 8-by-10-foot tarp, carry them out to my capacious back yard, dump them behind a stone wall, and let Nature take her course.

Older kid and I were out there raking on Wednesday afternoon, after school, filling the tarp six times and making a dent in the mess, while the leaves fell as fast as we could rake them. Meanwhile, from across the street, came a peculiar whining sound. I finally tracked it down: the lady across the street was vacuuming her yard.

I like this neighbour, a crisp, neat elderly woman still full of energy. Her yard, on the other hand, dismays me. It is a perfect weed-free emerald-green carpet, meticulously mowed. She has a tidy little garden too, to go with her honest foursquare little white house. I imagine that everything inside is clean and orderly, the carpets vacuumed regularly, windows cleaned twice a year, bathrooms sparkling. I imagine she's the sort of person who always balances her checkbook and keeps proper household accounts. I, on the other hand, have a shambling Victorian mess in need of cleaning and painting, and rotting in spots. Indoors is reasonably organized chaos, except for the bits that are mere chaos. The household bills go into a large cardboard box, which I will sort out when I can find the time. I couldn't balance a checkbook if you paid me, and the whole idea leaves me vaguely uneasy, like the smell of natural gas. If Ross and I work very hard, we can get rid of the bulk of the leaves, but there's no way we can get the yard CLEAN. This gives me a serious case of the guilts, which I can never quite put down. Dammit, I should be able to manage better...

But on Wednesday, under a dark-blue sky with the leaves drifting gold onto the patch of grass I'd just barely cleared, I stood for a few moments, leaning on my rake, and reality broke in like the dawn. My neighbour, bless her, is retired, lives alone, and has a great deal of time. I am a single parent trying to run a large house singlehanded, in spite of my kids, while earning a living the hard way as a contract writer. My neighbour has one tidy little maple tree that hasn't really turned yet. I have three huge trees that have just dumped their very considerable contents over a comparatively small space. Her little leaf blower would be hopelessly inadequate to deal with this mess. Not only that, I realized, but this isn't me making excuses. This is reality. This is true.

Why do we judge ourselves and each other so ruthlessly, without ever considering our own or the others' circumstances? We look sideways at each other, comparing notes and feeling righteously indignant, or hopelessly inferior, or smugly judgmental, or totally inadequate. We're quick to assume the worst and slow to count the best. And we drag God into it, assuming that God wants to do the same.

But what if God refuses to make comparisons? What if God looks at Mother Teresa and says, "Wonderful job; I love you very much" and ALSO says to the no-good _nebbech_ propping up the bar down at the hotel, "I know why you fetched up like this; I love you very much"? What if God, looking at my good and tidy neighbour says, "Thank you for creating such a beautiful lawn and keeping it so neat" AND says to me, "Thank you for enjoying My trees, and what's a few unswept leaves between friends"? What if God insists on seeing what it is--however little! --that we do that's good and right and loving and proper, while being perfectly willing to understand why, sometimes, we screw up or fail so badly? What if God knows just what it is that jars the arm so that the shot misses the mark? We are all, compared to God, so small, so frail, so less-than-good, so very badly wounded. God knows that.

Who says that God's logic is like ours" Our justice says "tit for tat" and "don't make excuses" and "you should have tried harder", but is that God's justice? Maybe God's justice is to ours as chaos theory is to Pythagorean geometry--that is, God's justice contains our "justice", but our "justice" is only a small, primitive part of His justice. Maybe that's why Jesus tells us over and over, in the strongest possible language, not to judge others: because Jesus, unlike the rest of us, knew what God's justice truly is. And knowing God's notion of justice and how poorly our notion of justice approaches God's, he warns us strongly: "Do not, under any circumstances, try this at home."

Maybe in hanging around with loose-living Samaritan women at wells, and lowlife types, and lepers and the like, Jesus was saying something about God's *justice*, as well as God's love. Maybe God sees something in irresponsible welfare mothers and drug dealers and people who don't try as hard as we think they should. Maybe God sees things in the frivolous exploitative unthinking rich that I don't see. Maybe God's justice holds these people in the palm of God's hand, tenderly retracing the track of their lives, seeing the wounds that sent them spinning off course, and grieving for the deep and early harm that causes them to hurt themselves and others. Yes, we have trouble with that sort of justice; but then, we are creatures of such limited empathy, such tiny imagination.

As these thoughts twirled in my mind like the leaves through the air, I found I could look both at my neighbour's beautiful emerald carpet and my own messy yard and feel--not that my yard isn't a mess, something I'm responsible for and have to manage as best I can--but that I really can't do it all. Honestly and honourably, the Lawn Beautiful is beyond my best capacity. If that's okay by God, I guess I have to go along. If God can forgive me for being a much less than perfect person--for being messed up and inadequate and incapable of keeping up with the workload --then I guess I'll have to forgive me too.

Back to raking. I'll do what I can, God. That's all I can promise. It will have to do.