I have in recent weeks spent a considerable amount of time vacuuming my lawn.

Rarely have I been more grateful that my yard is screened rather thoroughly from the street by a fence and by thick foliage.

I can keenly imagine how a passer-by might react to the sight of a man hunched over, dragging along a wet/dry vacuum by an extension cord as if it were a poorly trained dog on a leash, and jabbing at the grass with a crevice tool in an apparently random fashion.

It would, I suspect, look like an insect-collecting experiment, or else incipient insanity.

Most probably the latter, considering that I enliven my vacuuming sessions by listening to rock music through my headphones, and I tend to gesticulate wildly as though I were playing a guitar or the drums, or sometimes both simultaneously.

An innocent bystander might in fact assume I was being electrocuted, or that the crevice tool had suctioned itself to my foot and would not let go.

All this has to do with an ash tree.

It’s a wonderful old tree, really. The base of its trunk is about as thick through as a whisky barrel, and even after the pruners hacked away a couple years ago at the side that crowds the power lines, its canopy sprawls enough to shade the whole southwest corner of our lot. So long as the temperature stays below 90 or so it’s generally quite pleasant to sit beneath the ash.

In autumn its leaves turn a yellow so brilliant that in sunshine you have to squint to get a good look. My kids are fond of leaping into the crunchy, aromatic piles of leaves (they are, sadly, less interested in wielding a rake).

All in all I wouldn’t trade the ash for any two other trees on the place.

It happens, though, that one ash tree is the perfect number of ash trees for our property.

The trouble is that our ash wants to reproduce.

And its efforts to procreate remind me of nothing so much as the reputation rabbits have in that particular pursuit.

The past two summers the ash has produced a crop of seeds that would feed a modest-sized city, if only ash seeds were palatable.

(And perhaps they are. Frankly I’ve been too preoccupied with sucking them from my turf to bite into one.)

These seeds grow mainly at the tips of limbs, forming clumps that look rather like swarms of pale green insects.

The seeds detach themselves, even when the air is utterly still (which if you’ve lived here long you understand it rarely is) with a consistency and volume that leave me in despair that I can ever stay ahead of the deluge.

Several times during the height of summer I sat in a plastic Adirondack chair, basking in the ash tree’s cool shadows with a book and a glass of iced tea, only to be driven to distraction (and occasional profanity) by a steady shower of ash seeds, some of which made an audible tick, rather like a hailstone, when they landed on one of the chair’s arms.

Or in my glass of iced tea.

And what a fecund rain it was.

The ash seeds germinate so reliably that what I ought to do is bag them and sell them to a nursery under the brand “Instant Ash” or something similarly boastful.

Were the seeds sterile I’d probably let the lawnmower chew them up and leave it at that. The mower at least chops the seeds so that the sharp tips of the pods are less apt to give bare feet the occasional painful nip, like the bite of a small but angry ant.

(And going barefoot, of course, is one of the great pleasures of maintaining a soft green lawn.)

But the whirling steel blade seems to have no effect on the seeds themselves, except possibly to invigorate them to even greater feats of reproduction.

Last summer I noticed, to my growing horror, that a forest of tiny ash trees had invaded my property.

And not only below the parent ash tree.

Ash seeds, which have the sort of aerodynamic properties to impress an aircraft designer, apparently need the assistance of the gentlest zephyr to explore every part of my lot.

I found ash trees, most of them about as long as my index finger, growing in profusion not only among stems of Kentucky bluegrass and perennial rye, but in every flower bed, peeking out from between California poppies and carpeting the bare ground beneath the raspberries and snuggling up to the sunflowers’ stalks.

Indeed there was scarcely a square foot from which I didn’t see at least a few fledging ashes flaunting their tiny leaves, which I began to see as the arboreal equivalent of extended middle fingers.

The seedlings are easy enough to pluck from the soil, it’s true. But the problem is one of numbers.

It’s a simple matter to squash a single aphid, to cite another diminutive yet prolific pest. But when the bugs are so numerous that they form a fuzz on leaves, like mold on a container of month-old chili that got wedged behind the milk and the beer in the refrigerator, eradication becomes exponentially more difficult.

All of which goes to explain why this summer I decided to attack the problem at its root.

Or rather, before there were any roots.

There is a certain Sisyphean element to my vacuuming campaign, to be sure.

Even as I sweep the green, seeds racing by their dozens into the maw of the machine, others waft down to fill the gaps, like a fresh draft of soldiers during a costly offensive.

But my toil is not without reward.

Vacuuming, as anyone knows who has done much of it, can be a satisfying task as you watch a mess suddenly disappear. It’s the sort of instantaneous achievement that you can’t get with a bottle of cleaning fluid and a rag, which inevitably leaves behind a streak or a splotch.

Also the ash seeds, if given even a few hours to accumulate, lie so thickly on the grass that each pass with the crevice tool yields a gratifying haul, the sort of minor triumph that makes the larger battle seem worthwhile.

Besides which it gives me a valid reason to use my shop vac, which is nice because I don’t actually own a shop, or even a garage.

Jayson Jacoby is editor of the Baker City Herald.