Raking the Leaves

It's the first Saturday in November, and this afternoon I've enjoyed the sunshine, shade, air, and physical work all associated with the late-fall-to-early-winter task of getting fallen leaves off the lawn. I stroked a kind of rhythm with the swoosh of the rake getting the leaves into piles, as I listened to the shrill sounds of the leaf blower my neighbor across the street applied to the same task.

Invention is the mother of necessity: Historian Melvin Kranzberg's second law of technology. I've never actually wanted a leaf blower, though my sales resistance has certainly failed in a lot of other areas where I've taken on one "necessity" after another.

I do admire the holdouts, the resisters of the never-ending parade of Next Big Things. Thoreau, a lover of walking and a despiser of the railroad, said he could make a twenty-mile trip as fast by walking as another might by train, reasoning that the rail traveler had to devote a half-day earning the wages for the train ticket, then another half day to the trip. Henry would simply devote the entire day to walking, and enjoy the trip more for being able to appreciatively take in the country through which he traveled.

My afternoon of raking was physically demanding enough to cause me to break a sweat under my flannel shirt. I suppose I could have done the work faster with a leaf-blower, then I would have had time to drive to the gym and exercise there. That course of action would have been more consistent with the zeitgeist. Apply all possible aids to the cause of efficiency in your tasks, so you can do more tasks.

Another approach to fall lawn care involves just waiting until all the leaves are off all the trees, then cleaning them up in a single campaign against the clutter of dry fallen foliage. But it seems to me that I have to move most, if not all, of the leaves anyway. Why not go outside on several sunny afternoons and enjoy using my body? We tune our lives too much to the pace of machines, and natural rhythms, those biological realities we share with other forms of life, get forgotten.

Leaves don't fall all at once anyway. Today, only a few oak leaves were on the ground. Oak-strength holds the leaf to the limb the way their sturdy trunks hold the limbs. There will be brown leaves left on the red oaks in March, making it hard to get everything perfectly neat, even in time for spring.

I confess I don't much care about perfection. As Carl Jung observes in his interesting essay "Answer to Job," perfection only exists where completeness is absent. You have to leave out a lot of reality to sustain the illusion of perfection.

So my leaves will be gathered into piles for removal a little at a time, and when I finish (or more accurately, when I just stop raking them) there will be a few here and there to carry on their slow movement into the earth. I can live with that.