Leaves

Dad recalls that he and Mom were impressed by all of the trees in Park Forest Village when they were house hunting in State College before we moved there. The house on Cherry Ridge Road was well endowed with tall oaks, maples, chestnuts, sassafras, and hickories. It was only after moving in that he and Mom realized what a chore it was to rake up all those leaves they’d shed during the fall.

We lived backyard to backyard with our neighbors the Ertekins, a family of four with two children, Elif and Emre, whom we summoned outside to play every chance we got. Their lawn, which Mom and Dad’s bedroom window overlooked, was impeccably maintained, as was that of a house next door to theirs, belonging to a professor of turf grass at Penn State. Mom, loathe to be noticed as the unkempt yard on the block, sought to keep things respectably tidy. In autumn, she armed us with lawn care tools and marshaled the ranks to get to work as the leaves came down.

For us kids the falling leaves were, without question, a feature: we’d grab rakes (I favored one with green steel tines that were arranged more in parallel than fanned out) and push-pull the grounded foliage all afternoon, starting with a lawn-carpeting layer and gradually forming big, heaping islands of red, brown and gold leaves. Then, at the end of the day, we’d set aside our rakes and jump in the piles, some of them as high and cushioned as a cloud.