Old School

Today was a day of light and shadows, warm enough for a bike ride and a nice day to rake up the last of the leaves from the yard.

Leaf blowers have taken over the world.  Some days during the fall they whine incessantly throughout the neighborhood.  I don't like them.  They seem  a noisy, polluting waste of energy.

The scratch of a rake, on the other hand, takes me back through the autumns of my life, to my first memories of raking huge piles of elm leaves in Kansas, which we happily jumped into and ran through.

Perhaps a leaf blower would be faster - there must be some reason people use them.  But I'll leave the blowing of leaves to the real wind.  I'll stick to the rake.  A simple tool - springy tines of metal fanning out from the end of a long wood pole - that sends vibrations up into my hands as it presses into the earth, dragging up the leaves and pushing them ahead, toward the growing pile.   A tool that lets me work out in the day, still hearing the sounds around me - the birds, dogs, people walking by, cars passing on the street behind, and yes - even the sound of the damn leaf blower whining away in the distance!