Fall Leaves 2015
Greetings to everyone.
Fall is a wonderful time of the year, September being the best of the Autumn months. The air crisps at night. The scents in the air wax with the musk of the drying leaves covering the ground. The morning and evening light warms you with comfort. And, if you are lucky enough to be home when it happens, the furnace kicks in for the first time, and you can enjoy the smell of warming ducts throughout the house.
This year, Colorado enjoyed a long September, one which spilled over an entire month to nearly the end of October. The past week saw a significant cool down and rain, but sunny, mid-60s days warmed the weekend.
I love the fall, but there comes a point when the leaves littering the ground have to go; I can't stand having them on the lawn during the Winter and Spring months. After dining on an ordered-in pizza on the patio (pepperoni and sausage, but all I got was the sausage—Xavier picked all the pepperoni off and ate it, leaving sausage and cheese behind), Xavier and I paid a visit to the tool shed.
I know my son. He likes to help. So I pulled out a smaller rake for him, a larger rake and a coal shovel for me. We grabbed some 39-gallon trash bags, a trash can and headed for the lawn. It did not take Xavier long to figure out how to work the rake: he watched Dad do it a few times, then he dragged his rake behind him through the litter of leaves.
He helped pull leaves into piles for a while. Then, the idea struck him: A pile of leaves, a sunny, Indian-summer day (perhaps the last of the year) and a two-year old boy: it just added up. He waded into the pile, sat down, then pulled the pile close around him.
Then the playing began. He gathered armfuls of leaves and threw them to the wind. There was little to no wind today, but that did not matter. He spent a good quarter hour in his pile, ignoring Dad who worked at cramming the pile into trash bags.
Eventually, Xavier thought the loading up of the trash bags might be as entertaining as thrashing in the leaf pile. He stood up and gathered another armful of leaves. Wading out of the pile, he headed for the trash can.
The piles quickly went from ground to trash bag, but on the fourth bag, Xavier must have decided Dad was not moving fast enough at getting the liner into the trash can. He figured any container would work. He found a large, nearly empty flower pot to use. While Dad fiddled about with the last liner, Xavier forged ahead. "We're burning daylight," he might have been thinking.
Before turning in for a well-deserved nap, Xavier posed with our daily legal limit of leaves.