I am a summer person at heart. I love the warm weather. The long days mean more time to do the important things like water skiing.
Summer’s departure often brings me down. It’s the same feeling you get when someone you love moves away. You know you’ll see them again, but that knowledge does little to soothe the soul.
That’s not to say I dislike the other seasons. Winter is fine up until Christmas. After that it’s just a bleak reminder that it isn’t summer yet. Spring at least has the hope of summer but is too much of a tease. Then there’s fall.
Fall seems to understand that I’m missing my friend summer. As such, it often allows summer to send a postcard. You know, a 75 degree note to let me know she’ll be back. Those days when the sun soars across a cloudless sky let me know I’m not forgotten.
On one of those postcard days recently, I traded the sport coat and slacks for running shorts and a tee shirt. I headed out on one of my favorite running routes to read the note that summer had sent. Like a lover, she had sprayed wonderful perfume on her note. As I ran along through the park, I became intoxicated by the fragrance of freshly mowed grass mixed with the scent of dry leaves warming in the afternoon sun.
The combination loosened my brain the way alcohol loosens the lips and allows conversation to flow more freely. The effect was to open a portal in the fabric of time allowing me to leave the park and run through the past. It was sort of like “Back to the Future” but with a pair of running shoes instead of a DeLorean. I was now jogging down Memory Lane.
I remember the days of raking the yard. We didn’t know what a leaf blower was. They hadn’t been invented yet. Or at least you couldn’t find them in the Sears catalogue. And in those days, if it wasn’t in the Sears catalogue, it didn’t exist. Back then when we raked leaves, we actually “raked leaves”. For the uninitiated, that’s where you use a rake and a healthy dose of elbow grease.
Our house had a yard that a couple of really big oaks called home. There was a wooded area to the right of the house as you faced it. The trees living there did their part to contribute as many leaves to the cause as they could. Inevitably the day would arrive when my father would pull the rakes from their place of honor in the tool room and off we’d go to make the yard a cleaner place.
We would rake the leaves down the slight slope of our yard toward the woods. Where the yard met the woods, the ground dropped off sharply about four feet. This made an ideal spot for a leaf fort. With the lives piled at the edge of the yard, you could get behind them in the drop off and never be spotted. IT was perfect for cops and robbers, cowboys and Indians, spy vs. spy, or, since my father was a special agent with the A.T.F., revenuers and bootleggers.
Somewhere along the way we felt it necessary to give our battles a little bit of authenticity by using BB guns instead of our fingers or a cap gun. As long as you wore a thick jacket, husky jeans, and some goggles you were good to go. Some of my friends had actual Army helmets from the surplus store. Nothing is more of a wake-up call than a BB to the back of the head.
And “No” our parents didn’t know because they would have taken our guns. Apparently, some of the kids who engaged in such activity grew up to be the adults who developed paintball and Airsoft guns.
After the wars had been won, we would drive the leaves into the woods in a special way. The lay of the land was ideal for the good ole leaf jump and slide. You could hit the leaf pile at a good clip and then slide on them down the drop off into the woods. Think of it as a water slide with leaves instead of water and trees that you could smack into if you didn’t approach the pile just right. It was this activity that taught me an important lesson.
After one particularly active session of leaf sliding, a friend and I were sitting on the front stoop taking a break. We were not only convinced that leaf sliding should be an Olympic sport, we were certain that we would garner gold for the good ole U.S.A. It was then that my friend took several deep sniffs of the air in general and then of me before declaring “you stink!”
An inspection of my backside from my shoulders to my rear end told the tale: What a bear does in the woods a dog does on the lawn and then gets raked into the leaf pile.
Mind you this was before the days when people donned plastic grocery bags on their hands like gloves and picked up the lumps of love left on the lawn by their four-legged children. Heck, we didn’t even have plastic grocery bags. We only had the big brown paper ones that mom always saved to use as trash bags in the kitchen bin. Besides we lived in the country and the only time you handled such material was when you mucked a stall and you certainly didn’t use your hands for that.
I get why people do it. It is considerate. But the only time it would be mildly tolerable is on a winter day when you’ve left your mittens at home. It’s not exactly what I would call an ideal hand warmer but I suppose it beats frostbite. That’s why I’m glad I still live near the woods. When nature calls our little dog, that’s where she goes to give an answer. I see no need clean up there. After all no one runs around behind the squirrels and the deer.
I can’t blame the previous blathering on a runner’s high. Rather it is what happens when you go running down Memory Lane without checking to make sure the bridge over the stream of consciousness is intact lest you fall in and get swept away like I just did.
