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Saturday, Aug. 01, 2020 - 10:33 PM

I Let the Leaves Just Lay There
by Adam Jeffrey Jr.

We enjoy the leaves in the fall, my wife and I. We enjoy watching the leaves change color and we enjoy seeing the tree lines from the roads changing different colors together. We even like the falling of the leaves and the way they cover the ground like a crispy blanket. Somehow all of this exfoliation is beautiful.

I like the leaves so much that I leave them alone after they fall onto our yard. I let the leaves pile up and clog our gutters. When it rains our gutters overflow from being already full of leaves and it makes a water feature for my wife and I.

My neighbors blow their leaves with gas-powered things all afternoon into the street or they’ll blow them into piles and put them in bags and then put the bags at the end of their driveway and hope that the garbage man will take them, but I say, “Hey, blow those leaves into my yard. I’ll take them.” And they do. And at night I grab any bags of leaves from the curb and dump them into my yard.

By this time my wife is about done with all of the leaves, I can tell, but she’s patient with me.

I put a sign on my mailbox that says “Leaves Wanted” so people around town will dump their truck loads of leaves into my yard. Word spreads.

My father-in-law usually stops over by now and asks if I need any help with the leaves. He has his gas-powered blower that you wear on your back and he has large rakes and hundreds of contractor garbage bags but I just say, “No, thanks, Tom, I got it under control. Just like leaves, that’s all.” Sometimes I don’t think he is there for the leaves but because he is worried I’m losing my grasp. I’m not mad at him about that.

My neighbors are thrilled with my willingness to accept their unwanted leaves. People from nearby counties lineup in pickup trucks full of leaves on my street waiting their turn. I rake the leaves out of the beds of the trucks into my yard or if the leaves are in bags I tear them open and dump them right out. Some people say, “You composting or what?” and I say, “That’s a good idea but no. I just want as much leaves as I can get.”

The leaves get deeper than the snow gets in the winter and my lawn isn’t really a lawn anyway before all of the leaves. The ground was mostly dirt and some clover and some dandelions. I don’t believe in grass. From space my square of property probably looks like a tiny quilt square of lava -- the leaves are so red and orange and yellow.

By now I’m really trying hard to keep my wife on my side. We can’t go anywhere because our cars are covered with leaves and the leaves are so heavy we can’t get our cars out. It’s hard to open the front door and go to the mailbox. We get fired from our jobs.

We also have major spiders because for some reason the spiders love all of the leaves piled high. Spiders aren’t really a problem and I don’t try to kill them or any of the other pests that start living in the leaves. Not even the mosquitoes. I don’t bother them so they don’t bother me, it turns out.

Shortly thereafter it’s hard to see the house or see out of the house the leaves are piled so high.

Then the leaves lose their color because the rain washes them out and the leaves start to rot but they smell sweet anyway. I almost like the leaves even more now that they’ve changed further. The leaves are heavy and compressed into a thick sloppy mass.

My wife has had it with the leaves and is upset that we don’t have any more money. I try to take some leaves and make a dollar bill out of them but it would have been easier when the leaves were still green. I couldn’t make a convincing dollar bill out of the brown, rotted leaves. It says a lot that my wife hasn’t left me at this point.

I burrow myself into the rotting leaves with the spiders and centipedes. Winter starts. The cold rain and snow melts the leaves gradually while I’m burrowing there. The whole time I stare at a dead roly-poly. Its monument is itself; a dried-out exoskeleton; exactly the same but empty. The only monument I will leave are my bones. And even then my bones will be buried under a different monument to distance me even further away. I hope somehow these melting leaves will preserve me like a bog mummy they find sometimes in Florida.

But before I know it my wife is waking me up and there I am in the middle of the yard. The leaves are all gone and she says, “It’s spring and the yard needs mowed. If you need help you can call my dad.” I see that the clover and dandelions that make up my lawn are tall and healthy from all the dead leaves. I say, “I think we can wait another day to mow. I think it’s too wet, anyway. Is it going to rain tomorrow?”

It happens this way every year.

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