Yesterday was the day we decided it was time to finally take care of the multitude of leaves that decided to make our backyard their new resting place. The easiest way to describe how our backyard looked was: think of a million and 7 leaves, now think of them scattered aimlessly over the grass without allowing any grass to peek out. It was pretty at first, maybe even a bit nostalgic. Having never really had to rake leaves in the past, we thought it would be fun. But let me preface this with: fall is a season. The leaves don't fall off all at one time. They keep coming and coming and coming. Thus we keep raking and keep raking and keep raking. We decided to wait for every last leaf to make it's final decent before we picked up the rake for the last time. We deemed yesterday "The Last Time".
On a side note, all of our neighbors (who are all native to this region), have this funny looking contraption that actually sucks up all the leaves into a bag. I'm thinking that will be an excellent birthday present for Chuck next year. The only rakes in the neighborhood appear to be ours.
So here we are family bonding all day Saturday in the backyard working our butts off. We're cutting down brush, dead tree limbs and raking leaves and raking more leaves. We raked so many that we had 10 massive piles. Yes, I know, we wanted a lot with trees and we got just that. We just didn't remember that there is a season called Autumn since we've kinda skipped that one for the past 25 years down in Texas. Lots of trees mean lots of leaves. The first time we raked, it was for the sole purpose of jumping in the leaf pile. And boy was it fun (and itchy). We thought that would be it. But we thought wrong. We could have jumped in a leaf pile everyday for 2 months if we wanted to.
So there are our 10 ginormous piles scattered randomly over the backyard. We didn't have any lawn bags to dump them into. We decided to leave them there and run out and get the bags after dinner. What we forgot was that after dinner it would be pitch black out already because of the time change. It also seemed we were having a little change in our weather pattern. The wind decided to start gusting at some obscene speed. It also decided to start creeping dangerously close to the freezing point. Freezing weather and cold wind do not a friend make.
While the kids are all snuggled up watching "Over the Hedge" inside, Chuck and I are outside battling the elements. First of all, I'm armed with a flash light that has the diameter of a penny. The largest we could find. The lighting back in our wooded backyard is about the color of pitch black. So we were thankful for the pin point of light, but it was making it awfully hard to see where the lawn bag was when one was trying to dump a shovel full of leaves inside a small hole in the dark. Add to that the wind gusts and our little charade was quickly developing into a nightmare. The wind was blowing ALL the leaves off of our 10 gigantic piles and re-spreading them over our beautifully leaf-free lawn again. It was a race against time and wind. At one point Chuck & I were standing in front of one of the piles trying to block the flow of any more leaves out into the yard with only our bodies as a shield. We were not about to let a whole day of work be blown away.
We managed to fill 10 lawn bags with leaves. However, that only took care of 4 of the 10 piles we had spaced strategically all over the yard. We had to cut our losses and go in for the night. I think I dove in head first into my tub of boiling hot water. I don't do cold well. I know... it's going to be a long winter. But at least we won't have any leaves under all that snow (once we finish picking up the rest of the piles tomorrow). And that's all that really matters.
