My neighbor blows his fall leaves into the street and they collect in front of my house. Do I bring it up or just rake twice?

Every windy day, a new crescent of leaves forms against the curb in front of my house.

Some are mine. We have two maples, and I am not trying to assign every leaf an address. The problem is the neat brown wave I watched my next-door neighbor create with his leaf blower on Saturday. He cleared his lawn and driveway, pushed everything into the street, then worked the pile along the curb until it was past his property line.

By Sunday morning, most of it was sitting in front of our storm drain and the passenger side of my car.

I raked the pile into yard bags because rain was forecast and I did not want to deal with a wet mat later. It took about forty minutes. While I was working, the neighbor drove past, lifted one hand from the wheel and gave me a friendly wave.

That wave has become the tiny detail making me angrier. He may not have noticed what I was collecting. In my least generous interpretation, he noticed perfectly and was pleased the leaves had become my task.

We have never had a real conflict. We exchange tools, bring each other mail that lands at the wrong house and chat over the hedge. He is meticulous about his yard. I am less meticulous, but I do not leave piles in front of his place.

I also know wind complicates the evidence. If I approach him with a speech about “your leaves,” he can reasonably point at every tree on the block. I do not need him to admit botanical ownership. I need him to stop deliberately directing a pile down the curb.

My spouse thinks I should wait until I see it happen again and say something in the moment: “Could you keep the pile on your side? It gathers by our drain.” That is probably better than saving resentment, but I hate correcting people while they are in the middle of a task. It can sound like supervision.

The alternative is to accept that shared streets redistribute yard mess and spend another hour each fall cleaning whatever reaches us. That would be easier socially and worse internally, because I would be performing generosity while keeping score.

Would you raise it now based on what I saw, or wait for a repeat? And how do you make the request about a behavior—where he blows the pile—without starting an impossible argument about where individual leaves came from?