Turning Over An Old Leaf

As I write this, I'm sitting in my "new" home office in the old farmhouse by the lake, and for a change the morning sunlight is streaming through the windows. But before it gets to me, it entertains the remaining leaves on the old oak trees and turns them a golden tan. My house is surrounded by oaks, and so every fall, unless there is a lot of wind, my house is surrounded by oak leaves.

When I was closer to the ground and all my physical systems were nearly perfect, I loved jumping in the piles of leaves every autumn. They stuck in your hair (those were the good old days), your clothes, and there was leaf dust up my nose. After the pile had reached a certain size, it was dragged on a tarp to the driveway and ceremonially burned. Now, it was not so much the glow of the leaves as they turned to ash, but the smell of the smoke It said "Fall, this is it, get your jollies - football, caramel apples, warmish days and coolish nights, because the snow is just around the corner." We never called it autumn because, I think, at that stage of the game, we lacked perspective.

When I became a home owner, I discovered the down-side of leaves. I had to rake the damn things and discovered that their arrival on the ground occurred continually, as opposed to all at once. I learned by heart the prayer for the wind to come and convey my leaves to my neighbors' yards or to the street so I could pretend that the result had nothing whatsoever to do with me.

Three decades ago when I moved to my present home named "Shambles" as much for the way a Scottish terrier moves when not chasing squirrels as for the pathetic quality of my housekeeping - I had to learn to live with an acre of oak trees. Year upon year, every autumn weekend I went out with the rake and a tarp and raked and raked and raked and hauled and hauled and hauled. It was wearying and tiresome.

Local ordinances prevented the burning of leaves, so I started bagging them up, until plastic bags were forbidden, in favor of large and not inexpensive paper bags.

The next step was to buy a shredder to reduce the volume of leaves, and that in turn reduced the number of paper bags of leaves, which lowered the cost of having the garbage service pick them up and take them to what must be the world's largest compost heap.

Then my hip began to deteriorate, although I am sure that the 75 shredded bags of oak leaves each autumn had nothing to do with it. No sirree.

I couldn't rake 'em, couldn't burn 'em, had become tired of shredding 'em, and hated hauling 'em out to the driveway.

What to do? I mulled this over through a winter and finally decided to hire a lawn service which offered a fall clean-up. I had some difficulty persuading myself that paying somebody else to cut the grass just so he would be willing to vacuum up all my leaves and remove them from the premises, but thinking about shredding, bagging, and hauling seventy-five bags of leaves became the fulcrum for my decision to pay a lot more money to solve the problem.

My hip and my back were grateful. My wallet less so, but it has come to accept the advantages of this tactical decision.

One of the best decisions I ever made, it turns out. Now my only worry is whether Roland will show up before the snow covers the leaves, but so far he has a perfect record of making it in time - sometimes, just.

I don't think about leaves much any more, certainly not about jumping in piles of them or about burning them or smelling their smoke. But when the light transforms them of an autumn morning, happy memories from other earlier times begin to appear in my head.

When the memories of youth quieten, I remind myself that each of us is like a leaf - unique, transitory, more beautiful and compelling when we find that light which illumines us.