Sunday, November 8, 2009

Turning Over Some Old Leaves

We spent most of this weekend raking other people's leaves.

We do this every year. The leaves fall down sometime in mid-October or so. We make noises about raking them up. And sometime around the end of October, we get a giant windstorm that blows all of our leaves away and replaces them with someone else's leaves.

This year the winds came from the south, which means that our leaf-load was rather high. Our southern neighbors for several houses down have more trees than we do, and none of them are evergreens. If the wind comes from the north or west, though, we make out like bandits. From the east it's pretty much a wash.

Kim was first out with the rake, as she is the one who tends to notice these things. I've read stories of widowers who never change the decor in their homes or apartments once their wives pass on - not out of any intent to create a shrine to a departed loved one, but simply because it never occurs to them to do so. All I can say is that Kim had better outlive me. Either that or we had better do all of our decorating in "classic" styles designed to last.

It was a gorgeous weekend here in Our Little Town, with temperatures more like May than November. Seriously, it hasn't been this warm here since Labor Day. The sun was shining, the birds were singing, the woodland elves were doing whatever it is they do when not posing the garden gnomes suggestively, and it was time to play outside.

So Kim piled up about six cubic yards of leaves and declared it to be leaf-playing time.

The girls took this and ran with it.

They made a fort out of them.



 

They jumped in them.



They dive-bombed them from the zip line.



They ran through them.



Really, it was a shame to rake them down to the curb for pickup tomorrow, but so it goes. They went off to play with some friends in the late afternoon, and I took the opportunity to re-rake all those leaves and deposit them in the street for the sweeper to come by.

I really wish we could burn them. I've always loved the scent of burning leaves in the fall.

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