The leaves have wrestled themselves free from the trees in our yard again and are scattered, well, everywhere imaginable. We've had a love/hate relationship with the trees and the leaves in our yard. Lately it's been a little more love. Yes, if we were to rake them all we'd have easily 150 to nearly 200 bags. They're endless. They're annoying. They are an inviter of drudgery all around our neighborhood. You can almost hear the collective sigh on Saturday mornings as everyone gets to work with their leaf blowers and mowers.
But something about leaves whispers childhood...my own, and my kids'. I love the sweet, hay-like smell of dying, brittle leaves. I love the sound they make shuffling underfoot. And yes, it's a rite of passage, growing up in New England: raking a big pile of leaves simply in order to jump in them.
I remember the feeling of covering myself with leaves -- the scratchiness and dirt in my mouth and crumpled bits of leaves in my hair. Like being buried in sand at the beach, it's itchy and claustrophobic. But it's part of being a kid.
When Anna was just four months old I took a picture of her sitting in her baby carrier under one of the maples in our front yard, while I raked leaves. By the next year she was walking and the year after that she could run and jump into them -- which made the job infinitely more difficult. But also more fun.
That's always the tension, isn't it? You have things you need to do, and kids make things more messy and harder to accomplish, but also make you slow down and maybe even laugh, or actually jump into them yourself...if I we can take our eyes off the task at hand for just a moment.
The neighbors across the street, whose kids are grown, plunge into their leaf chores each October and November with grim efficiency. They mow and gather and clear the mass of leaves with precision and in what I would consider record time. No one is yelling...but no one's laughing, either.
Another neighbor doesn't tend to the leaves herself at all but rather calls a group of guys to stop by and remove nearly every last one of them in the span of a couple of hours.
I've written before about our arguments over leaf raking: the tears, the throwing down of rakes, the bribery, the backaches, the endless quest to complete a task that never gets done. For years, they stressed me out.
Then I started to realize a few things. I realized we didn't HAVE to rake all the leaves. I want to, but sometimes life, especially this stage of life, gets in the way. And while I do want to get rid of at least some of them, particularly in deference to our neighbors on either side, who work hard to take care of their yards, I also know that maintaining a meticulous yard is not my end goal in life.
I thought of an amazing family I once spent time interviewing and filming for the Children's Hospital. When we arrived at their house, their yard was a disaster. They'd had greater issues to confront, like keeping their child alive, and traveling out of state for additional care. They probably saw their yard with different eyes -- not as a leafy mess, but as home.
I realized we could bite the bullet and pay to have someone haul all of the leaves away. We have done that a few times. It's not cheap -- our yard may not be huge but is surrounded by trees in the back -- but doable.
Only there are times, in my calmer moments, when I think by having someone eliminate the tradition of raking up our leaves, we may end up missing something.
Would we miss out on those moments of looking up at the trees towering over us and watching as the wind wrestles a few free? As they sway to the ground, the kids try to catch them. Anna used to race around with a butterfly net. There are the times we've lain in a leaf pile and enjoyed the view looking straight up at the trees or the clouds. And even the bickering about who does what is fashioning a memory.
Anna hates raking leaves these days and has little interest in leaf jumping. Ethan is almost getting to that point, at least about finding pure joy in leaping into them.
"Eeth, do you still like jumping in leaf piles?" I asked him the other day when we were outside.
"If you rake a big enough pile, yes," he replied. Then he rolled around with Chloe in the pile we'd been raking. But I wonder if those days are drawing to an end. I wish they wouldn't. I wonder -- why do adults never jump in the leaves? I've been telling myself that I need to remember to.
Chloe is young enough that she will marvel at the smallest pile. This is one of the gifts of having a youngest child much younger than the older ones. I treasure the excitement in her eyes at the sight of all the leaves just a little bit more. I know in a way that I didn't when Anna and Ethan first jumped in the leaves: these days will fly by, just.like.that.
But they don't have to. Yes, there will be days to come when we'll find the house quieter and chores easier to manage. There will be days when maybe we'll be able to everything on our to do lists, but that doesn't mean we always have to.
For now, we've found a compromise. We do some of the leaves, and have someone take care of the rest. I don't know, maybe we'll keep things that way. It's great to make things easier. But sometimes hard, and messy, and overwhelming, and what you can work with your hands and breath in with your nose, those things that make you both laugh and cry, are what make you feel more alive. And they are absolutely beautiful.
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