By June Mathews
I love fall. I really do.
The cooler weather, the breathtaking colors, jeans and long-sleeve T-shirts, Halloween, Thanksgiving, the beginning of the Christmas season…I love it all.
But there’s one thing I don’t love about fall: Leaves. Specifically, fallen leaves. As long as leaves are on the trees, they’re fine. Great, even. The leaves of spring and summer provide beauty and shade; the leaves of early to mid-fall provide an eye-pleasing palette of color.
But once they start falling, I’m done. Leaves are no longer my friends. They’re brown and crinkly and messy. The wind blows them onto the porch, and they get tracked into the house. They get caught in the windshield wipers and make annoying flapping sounds as I drive down the road. They pile up on the downhill side of the street, creating a slip-and-slide effect for tires in wet weather.
And they have to be raked. And raked. And raked.
Now admittedly, I’m not the Chief Raker of Leaves around here. Jimmie is. But I’m the Chief Motivator of the Chief Raker of Leaves, and sometimes I think my job is harder than his.
I take that back. I KNOW my job is harder than his because motivating Jimmie out of his recliner during football season is a task I often doubt a stick of dynamite underneath him would accomplish. But even blown sky-high, I guarantee he’d land with the TV remote clutched protectively in his hand. For better or worse, the man’s got his priorities. I’ll give him that.
I have to say, though, he does a decent job of periodically raking up a few piles of leaves and placing several bagsful near the curb for the yard debris trucks to pick up. That way, he doesn’t have the whole job to do all at once after the trees are done shedding. But the piecemeal cleanup method often becomes a two-season process, barely finished in time for spring.
Sometimes I’ll help, but not often. I’m usually conveniently occupied with other pressing matters at leaf-raking time. Besides, finding two rakes in the basement with unbroken handles and complete sets of tines is often difficult. I don’t know why keeping rakes healthy and whole is so hard for us, but that’s always seemed to be the case ever since we’ve had a yard.
(No, I haven’t been purposely running over them with the car so I don’t have to help with the raking. Yeah, I knew what you were thinking.)
But regardless of how I feel about fallen leaves and raking, I dearly love the trees around the yard that produce them. Watching them bud in the springtime, sitting in the shade they kindly provide come summer and seeing their brilliant colors in the fall are simple joys I would never want to do without.
What I absolutely could do without is the mess my treasured trees make once the leaves start dropping because – in case you haven’t already picked up on this – I hate raking.
But as long as I can periodically motivate Jimmie out of his recliner and into the yard by convincing him that raking leaves is a job for a big, strong, handsome man (hey, I never professed to be a feminist), I won’t have to.