A 70-degree Sunday afternoon had me on the front lawn, raking leaves. Not for the first time did I ponder on the tradition that leads to the act of gathering dead leaves into piles for the purpose of sending them off to another place. Neither of the two homes that I have owned — one in Madera, California the other in Clarksville Indiana — had any leaf fall that required the lawns to be vacuumed. In the second-floor Irvington apartment that I occupied for six years, I watched the leaves fall from the trees and went outside to crunch through them on the way to the store, or my mailbox. When I walked north on Bolton Street toward Washington, I walked through piles of fallen leaves, leaves that have obeyed the trees’ need to renew themselves by detaching, and drifting away. Some of them were bigger than my head, and some small ones were still green, as if they’d been carried to earth by the fall of their sisters. Perhaps, as Robert Frost wrote, “leaf subsides to leaf.”
Once a year, my friend and I used to meet in Brown County to see the trees display the “turning of the leaves.” My 19-year sojourn in St Louis, Missouri caused a suspension of the tradition, which resumed when I returned to Indiana in 2012, but we’d begun to mimic Chevy Chase at the Grand Canyon: nod, nod, let’s get to Walley World. I remember writing that I am always startled to see that the leaves have “turned.” I have a vague knowledge of the weather conditions that contribute to the phenomenon, but this past week I stared at a tree at the sidewalk on the edge of my lawn that seemed to have, overnight, turned its green leaves into a brilliant yellow gold that blazes in the sunlight. Down the street, a huge pine has covered the sidewalk with the fine brown needles that my friends tell me are good mulch to help my dying hostas through the winter. My granddaughter and I gathered a bag of the needles, though not nearly enough for the hostas we have. Some of the leaves mixed in with the pine needles have fallen from a magnificent Magnolia tree. One of my friends suggested that I use some of the leaves I’m gathering to bed down my Hostas for the winter. She also chuckled that I was gardening, as I used to refer to the art as “grubbing in the dirt.” Things change.
My roommate/daughter has a leaf blower that she uses to push the fallen foliage around the lawn and into piles that my granddaughter plunges into and disperses. I am an old school rake person, notwithstanding the fact that I’ve never before had to rake. I like the rhythm of bend, reach, rake, repeat; I gather small piles and arrange them in lines that I extinguish with big black plastic bags. My granddaughter woke from her nap on this warm Sunday afternoon and, seeing me on the lawn, told her mother, “I want to rake too.” Her enthusiasm did not last long, but I was able to lay down my big rake and use her little one to scoop leaves into the bags. I crush the dried leaves in the bags, increasing the amount they can hold.
That Sunday afternoon, I raked leaves after I had returned from a ceremony on the placement of a historic plaque honoring the suffragist Grace Julian Clarke, who was instrumental, 100 years ago, in empowering the 55 million women voters who elected a woman as vice-president.
A new leaf, indeed.
cjon3acd@att.net