Raking Leaves with a fork

When I was a child, I was tortured every fall with manual labor--the kind that made your back ache and puts blisters on your hands. Just when the weed picking of the summer ended, the leaves turned and fell to their death, waiting for me to take them to their proper burial ground. I would have preferred just to leave the crispy skeletons lying there, but my mother had this thing about not wanting all the grass to die. Pshh, aesthetics.

I was remembering all this childhood torture because I just came in from raking the leaves off my yard. I scooped up all the ones that were actually on the grass, but I left the ones on the edges in the bark chips. This is because I had no room left in my yard debris bin. I will have to wait until Monday afternoon (after the garbage gets picked up) to finish the job. Provided it doesn't rain on Monday, which it most likely will.

When I set out to rake leaves, I bundled up. I had on sweatpants, a sweatshirt, a coat, and rubber boots. By the time I had raked up three piles, I was sweating. I had forgotten how much exertion leaf raking takes. Also, it wasn't 40 degrees outside like I had imagined. The process of leave raking wasn't as gruesome as I had remembered it as a child. But then again, I didn't have over 4,000 square feet of lawn to rake this time.

Growing up, leaf raking was ridiculous. We were both blessed and cursed to have four lawns, one on each side of the house. I'm not Michael Phelps, and I've never swam in an Olympic sized pool, but I imagine that at least two of the lawns were each as large as an Olympic sized pool. Besides all this grass, we lived in an area surrounded by oak and maple trees, which are both deciduous, in case you live in LA and know nothing about trees other than palms. We also had many fir trees nearby, which are non-deciduous. Oh how I had wished our house was surrounded by Douglas Firs instead of Maples. Maple trees shed a lot of leaves, and they are big, heavy leaves.

Raking up the leaves definitely took a least a week, and on some days my sister and I were out there raking for three hours or more. We would rake the leaves into huge piles on tarps, and then carry the tarps to the beginning edge of the woods to a place called "The Pit." As far as I know, my family's been throwing organic matter into The Pit for 23 years, and it's still not full. The Pit is the place where we would dump grass clippings, horse manure, food scraps, weeds, rocks, branches, and leaves. You never wanted to get too close to the edge, for fear you might fall in.

It was a lot of work to shake out the leaves on that tarp. Dragging it there wasn't fun either. A year or two after my sister got her pony, we decided to put him to work. We rigged up this contraption with a rope around his chest, and Hawk would pull our giant pile of leaves for us. He had to work for his hay. Hawk was a good, sturdy pony, and he liked working with us. For a treat we'd let him nibble the grass. Hawk was the type of pony that had limited access to green grass, because he was greedy and would eat until he got sick. Kind of like me with a pint of Ben and Jerry's ice cream.

When I moved away to college I was secretly very pleased that I wouldn't be home until Thanksgiving. This meant that I missed leaf raking. No more hours of back breaking work. In retrospect, I was obviously a terrible person for being happy about this, because it just meant that my poor mother had to do all the work by herself. So that shows you what kind of person I really was.