On Raking Leaves (Part 1)

I left the concrete path and began walking through wet grass. I noticed brown and orange leaves of maple and oak coloring the green. It was beautiful and I stopped, bent over, and picked up a leaf. With that touch, my mind drifted to similar leaves and similar grass in my Oregon City youth.

My large childhood yard in Oregon City had maple, cherry and oak trees. Every fall, the leaves would accumulate on the grass in prodigious amounts and it was my job to rake them up into piles and then carry the piles to…the…? I no longer recall what I did with them. This was long before curbside compost recycling. I may have just dumped the leaves into the side street. There, the street cleaners came along once a year and sucked them up, I think. The point was: get them off the yard.

I supposed I was blessed to live in a home with yard full of deciduous trees. Had I been surrounded by conifers, I would have been raking needles and not leaves and that is nowhere near the same aesthetic or physical experience.

Raking, raking, raking. I was a steel rake kid: green, wooden handle, sturdy, made in a US factory, last forever. There were no evil leaf blowers then. They came like marauders some 20 years later and now are a constant scourge of American life. They robbed of us silence where silence once reigned. They corrupted our souls and made us give up the rake. When you use one, and I have, you can’t think.

American gained a lot of pounds by giving up the rake. That is not a metaphor, but then again, it is.

My most indelible raking memory is that of Tex, my beagle. I would spend hours raking leaves into giant piles that I arranged to resemble an offensive line in football. Tex would stand on the opposite side of the piles. I would toss him a hamburger chew toy, he would snag it with his teeth, then bolt through the piles like the fat fullback he was. I would play middle linebacker, meet him in the hole, tackle him, and boy and dog would roll and roll on the grass, and the leaves would fly and fly.

He never fumbled.

After the game, I’d have to rerake the piles and then we’d go at it again. Then again. I suppose this wasn’t the most efficient use of the time spent raking, but in reflection, maybe it was because I am writing about now and crying while I write.

We played this game this for years. He knew it was coming when I started raking and waited with the hamburger in his mouth. When he died, he was buried in the yard with that hamburger. Raking alone the next fall produced some of the saddest moments of my young adulthood. Raking hasn’t been the same since.

Still, I’d love to play this leaf football game with a dog again! Or two. Or three. Let me rake again! Let me tackle dogs in the piles and have to rake them up all over again, or three times.