autumn leaves and a tangled chord

so i come home from work the other evening and decided after
much procrastination...well, really not procrastinating.  more like
standing around staring at the adjacent rooms surrounding me...
that i would vacuum the carpet.  there were autumn leaves scattered
everywhere

how do they get in here?
do i really come in and out of the house that much?
do i leave the door open that long to allow the blustery
winds of fall to escort them in via flight?
maybe they stick to my footwear (or socks) but
wouldn't you think that i would notice them crunchy
beneath my feet or just feel them as simply foreign objects?

however they get from the trees to my living floor
makes no difference.  the fact is that they don't belong in
the house.  and they've been there for too many days already.
dry, brown, dead foliage, sometimes mistaken for scary little varmints
out of the corner of my eye

so, i pull out the vacuum.  the Dyson. the super sucker.
the one with a wind tunnel container, hydraulic hoses and a 3.6 liter
engine that requires a large amount of electricity to run.
ok. i know that makes no sense, the engine part, but that's what
it sounds like when i flip the switch and start that 20 pound
yellow brick of a tool. and its not the one with the wheel so
that bitch is heavy to push!

i'm vacuuming.  the cats scatter from fright but not
before leaving behind toffs of hair during their escape,
now added to the pile of leaves

im vacuuming over the leaves, breaking them into teeny tiny
pieces as i run them over because they are too big whole to fit
under the nose of the yellow (over rated) tool.
then im down on my knees shoving them up the sucker nose,
lifting the front sometimes because the tool is just pushing them
around in front of it, even the teeny tiny pieces

up and down
back and forth i push

sweating

i get to the other side of the living room and i feel a tug

damn it. the chord is tangled. this is a problem which has, for some
unknown reason, irritated me

i freeze in thought.  motor still revving. just a few more square feet
of the carpet left to finish.  i don't want to walk back the twenty-feet
and untangle the mess of chord

maybe if i just tug a little more...flip the chord up a little like
swinging a jump rope.  gently.  easy.  i work on this for 5 minutes...

snap! the chord ejects from the outlet on the wall,
hits the kitchen chair,
ricochets across the table top,
knocks over a glass of water
and then strikes the plant on the  stand next to the chair
spilling most of its contents onto the hard wood floor.
the engine whines down slowly and comes to a complete stop

twenty feet

i hate those leaves