Today we spent four hours raking the voluminous amount of leaves out of our yard and on to the street for the city to come by and pick up. We have a few very large trees in our back yard that blanket the ground with six inches of dried up color. It’s all pretty and fun to march around in, but getting the leaves to the street is a cause of much strain and many sore muscles the following day.

In past years, it’s taken even longer as we’ve had to rake the leaves through a small gate to get them to the street. This year, I took the initiative to take part of the fence down. This gave us enough room to rake the leaves onto a large tarp and then drag them to the roadside. This idea works like a charm and I highly recommend it if you have a long way to move leaves. The tarp, like a hero’s cape, glides the leaves away from the yard with little effort on our part.

Still, it took four hours to get it done today. Last year, Laura had to do them by herself because I was in Hong Kong, and I’ve had to do it several years by myself as well. It’s known around our house as Leaf day and it’s never fun. However, after the yard is all cleaned up, it feels really great to survey the clean yard. It’s also fun to be able to work together on such nice autumn days. They’re all cleaned up this year, so we’ll wait until next year for the fun times of Leaf day.

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