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.
Do they still sell steel green rakes with wooden handles? I hate plastic ones. They are too stiff and graceless. Their sound and balance are all wrong and I hate the thought of wielding anything made from oil. Moreover, there is no poetry in plastic rake or a leaf blower for that matter.
Raking is such wonderful exercise for the body and mind. Each person wielding one has a unique raking and piling style. The accumulation of leaves is satisfying to behold.
That trilling sound of a steel rake raking up leaves through grass is so distinct and soothing. Massage therapists should play it during massages.
What about starting a one-man steel raking business? Advertise the silence, simplicity and sustainability of it. I pull up with one rake (a dog) and the homeowner directs me. It could work. It might be the only job I can get in the coming years. I’ll get a book out of it, too, meeting these rake people. I’ll bring a few extra rakes for the curious and portly to join in.
I like the raking metaphor. I rake Oregon stories, dogs, people, ideas, not to dispose of or compost, but to gather, order and admire. The metaphor stops there, although the composting of collected stories is a damn good one that I need to consider. I must also remind myself: the raking is the story, not the piling or the playing with dogs or the discarding. Sometimes the metaphor doesn’t necessarily stop, but extends only a certain distance.
During my many years as a high school English teacher, my favorite and most effective demonstration on the meaning of metaphor involved a steel green rake and a leaf blower. It worked like this: I would gather some leaves from yard, bring them into the classroom, and then scatter them on the floor in an open area near the front. First, as the students watched, I would leisurely rake the leaves into a neat pile. I might even whistle or say hello to the neighbors or birds while doing so. Second, I would scatter the leaves around the room again and then pick up the leaf blower, turn it on, and begin to herd the leaves into a pile. Of course, I also happened to accidentally blow notebooks, journals, pens, phones, and other student possessions off tables and desks. The leaf blower made quite the racket in the classroom and I never did get the leaves into a pile.
After this demonstration, I ran the students through a series of writing prompts, such as, if memory serves me:
Explain your preferred tool to gather leaves. Make a case for it.
Do you consider yourself more of a rake or leaf blower person?
Can a rake person and a leaf blower person be friends or fall in love?
Who would you want more for President? A rake or leaf blower person?
What kind of teacher/coach would you prefer? Rake or leaf blower person?
What’s the more interesting murder story? By rake or by leaf blower?
The students would write, write, write, and then we would share and then break into groups and write manifestos on behalf of the rake or leaf blower.
I admit it, I miss teaching that lesson. It was one of my better ones and I never had to define the term metaphor for the rest of the year.
What is it about leaves that arrest my attention? I know I am a leaf man and would choose to be a leaf over a star, that most interesting choice posed in the novel Siddhartha. Leaves decompose and nourish. Stars burn out and collapse into nothing.
The other day, I parked under three deciduous trees and beheld so many leaves of fading red, yellow, green and orange that I felt compelled to write a tribute to their beauty. There was even a single purple leaf serving as an exclamation point, or more likely, a question mark.
A leaf fell, then another. I wrote whatever entered my mind. Birds flew into the branches and dislodged more leaves. Fall was on. I returned to conversations overhead an hour ago in a dive bar. Everyone was talking of rain. Rain rolled off everyone’s tongues. The weather people predicted a big rain. They practically guaranteed it. With the storm, the trees will be denuded of their leaves. A few might survive to hang lonely in the branches, but hardly anyone will notice them, except a poet or photographer.
More leaves fell and my mind drifted to a poem, “A Leaf Falls,” by e.e. Cummings. I used the poem with my students in our leaf poetry writing workshop. We would assemble on a grassy field. They would sit down around the step ladder I brought with me. I would climb the ladder a tad higher than the safety instructions recommended. There, I would cast a leaf into the air. The students had until the leaf hit the ground to write a poem.
I’ll never forget the time when a kid bolted up from the ground and caught the leaf before it reached the earth. He then climbed up the ladder (I was still on it) and hurled the leaf (if one can actually hurl a leaf) into the sky. He yelled that he needed more time to write his poem.
Brazen. Rebellious. Dangerous. Usurping my teaching authority. Reckless. Wrecking my finely-honed lesson.
A+
More leaves fell from the trees. I sensed the orange ones were the generals and three green ones the proletariat.
The novel The Virgin Suicides entered my consciousness. I had recently read it for the first time and encountered easily the best leaf scene in American literature (ch. 3, pp 86-89). The author, Jeffrey Eugenides, compared the different methods that various suburban households raked their leaves. “The first weekend after leaf fall, we began raking in military ranks, heaping piles in the street.”
It was utterly original and brilliant and made me wish I could write that well. It’s the kind of scene that I’ll always recall whenever I see a family raking leaves together, which of course, I will never see again because American families don’t rake leaves together anymore.
I had to leave the leaves, but I could have stayed there for hours. I won’t return to this spot, but thankfully I have found a new leaves falling drive-in theater in my life. It’s near a river and there is no one ever around.