Raking

I came home from work yesterday exhausted. It had been a long, stressful week, and I was ready to relax. In fact, I'd pretty much been ready to relax for the weekend about ten minutes into work Friday. It really took a lot of effort on my part to stay at work. I was just zonked. And on the way home I thought to myself, I'm going to make dinner for the family and then I'm going to bed. Everyone else can fend for themselves.

And then I got home and saw the bottom of our driveway. Our driveway slopes down at a fairly steep angle towards our garage (You can sort of see it in this picture). To keep the garage and the rest of the basement from flooding, there is a drain at the end of the driveway. But when I came home last night and I was walking into our front door, I glanced in that direction and noticed that the drain was covered by about 4 inches of leaves. I knew there was a forecast of fairly heavy rain. Great, I thought. That's all I need, a flooded basement. So I changed clothes quickly, rounded up both of my daughters and one of their friends, and we set out to rake leaves.

And that's when the fun began.

I'm not sure what it was. Maybe it was that there were enough fallen leaves all around us to have that distinctive, autumnal odor. Maybe it was that it was a very warm day, in the high 70's. Or maybe it was that it was breezy, so that a few dozen leaves would sometimes lift themselves off of the ground and dance in circles. I'm not sure what it was, but something about the four of us out there raking was almost intoxicating, and it radiated beyond the four of us. As we raked and made piles of leaves and jumped into piles of leaves and had leaf fights, people started to notice. Soon cars were slowing down to smile and watch. A kid from down the street came walking towards us with a rake of his own and asked that if he helped rake would he be allowed to jump into the pile, too. Our next door neighbors, who are somewhere in their sixties, came over laughing and reminiscing about raking leaves with their children. I asked them if they wanted to jump in our pile, and they both laughed and said it was tempting. But I saw something more than just temptation in the husband's eyes, and when I told him I was serious--the pile was ready to be jumped in and he could be next--he smiled, bit his lower lip, and took about four steps toward the pile before stopping himself and saying, "No, no, no. I'd better not."

Lisa came out, and she and Natalie and I all jumped in the pile together. After about 45 minutes we looked up, and in yard after yard we saw people had pulled out their own rakes and were creating leaf piles and jumping in them. Natalie even said, without prompting, "Dad, it looks like the whole neighborhood is raking leaves!"

After all the fun, I did still have to get the leaves away from the garage door. When all was said and done, we had filled 13 lawn and leaf bags, and we weren't anywhere near being finished. We stopped because we only had 13 lawn and leaf bags.

I'm going to go get some lawn bags later today, and when the ground has dried out tomorrow I'll go back out and rake some more. But I can almost guarantee it won't have the same spark that it had Friday night. Sometimes there's just magic in the air.