"Leaf" me alone!

There's nothing better than bumping through a tall, grassy field with a decrepit, old truck to get your "country" on.  I will not wax on about the wonders of leaf raking in the fall. My husband is the only one in the household who revels in raking. Today, when the girls and I returned from an errand, we moaned collectively as we spotted the giant colorful piles dotting our lawn. While Brad continued raking like a maniac, my daughters and I brainstormed multiple ways to make the leaf transporting process easy and efficient. We managed to waste about twenty minutes over that particular debate. We spent another ten minutes admiring the dogs as they frolicked in the piles. After five truckloads, we realized we needed a break so we headed into the house for a little snack and a quick snooze.

An hour later, our set alarm went off and Syd headed off to work. Savannah conveniently slept through the alarm but I managed to stagger back out to the yard, collapsing into a chair to provide moral support to Brad as he precariously balanced himself forty feet above the ground on tip-toe, stretched out to clean our clogged gutters. I watched a woolley-bear caterpillar crawl across the driveway before drifting into dreamland for another few minutes. I was pleased to see, upon wakening, that my husband was still alive. He required my expert help momentarily to hold up a bucket in which to dump gutter sludge. I winced as the some of the stinky stuff splashed me but selflessly bit back a complaint as I observed that Brad's arms, up to his shoulders, were coated in slime.

With a wary eye to the horizon, Brad re-focused his efforts on emptying his lawn of leaves. The dachshund and I were assigned to truck duty, Brad valiantly trying not to be exasperated as I am incapable of being directed with obscure hand signals. "Me waving my hand towards my shoulder means keep going and my hand held with the palm facing you means stop," he explained several times after sighing dramatically as the sky continued to darken. He rode with me for a couple trips across the field but suddenly shifted tactics by choosing to run from the pile directly to the dumping area, meeting the truck to offer me useless hand signals (I offered him a few in return) before leaping energetically into the back to remove the leaves before I had even exited the cab. Then he would run back to the house before I had even turned the key in the ignition. "You were going so slow," Brad explained later, "we would have been doing leaves until midnight."

Finally, as the sun slipped past the horizon, the last leaf was lassoed. Savannah tried to steal some of my thunder by arriving for the last two loads but I'm pretty sure that Brad gave me the due-credit that reflected my efforts. Oh no! I may have really screwed up this time. He might actually expect this level of uncomplaining, tireless and focused assistance next year!