Down in the Weeds

I spent the better part of a balmy Sunday afternoon in December raking leaves.

Had I known, back in the day, how difficult and time consuming fall clean up could be, I might have thought twice about jumping into the perfectly formed leaf piles that occasionally dotted the curb in front of our apartment house. My belated apologies to the rakers and sweepers and blowers I unwittingly took for granted.

Raking, on an unseasonably warm and sunny December afternoon, was tiring but invigorating, mind-numbing but mystifying. Instructive, satisfying, filled with "eureka" moments about the meaning of life and the depth of my own inadequacies. (Not all about me, but significantly, at least.)

I started with the blower. It took me a few minutes to get the hang of it and avoid sending gusts of leaves onto the neighbors' lawn. I was buoyed by instant gratification, the growing mass of brown, dead, crunch on the driveway, ready to be swept and stuffed into awaiting bags. The high was short-lived though; despite vigorous blowing, I still could not see more than a few stalks of green grass poking up out of the weeds. I had barely scratched the surface; I took off my jacket and rolled up my sleeves.

The gratification was progressively less instantaneous, but far more rewarding. I dug deep with the blower, burrowing the narrow tip deep within the tangle and feeling downright gleeful as one large clump after another exploded into the air with a silent hallelujah. Free at last, free at last. The pile in the driveway grew, and the lawn began to burst with color. Neighbors on ladders stringing lights and miniature Santas notwithstanding, it was beginning to look a lot less like Christmas and a lot more like spring. The silver lining of climate change.

Having mastered the blower, I moved on with confidence to sweeping and raking and even getting down on my hands and knees to grab armfuls of muck to speed up the fruits of my labor. My need for instant -- or at least expedient -- gratification has been years in the making, and is not easily undone.

My friend laughed at me when I told her I was a bit delayed, would not be able to meet her for a little while because I was raking leaves. (She was equally appalled, once, when I confessed to shoveling my own driveway.) Weekends are for play, not work, and manual labor might be for somebody, but certainly not for a Jewish princess from Brooklyn. Maybe so, but when you like to do whatever it is you do well, there is nothing like being able to see the results right when you finish, instead of waiting and wondering (and doubting) whether you can be anything close to perfect.

Truth be told, it wasn't anything close to perfect. A start, but we ran out of lawn bags before we were even close to retrieving every dead leaf. I kept at it as long as I could -- just one more clump, one more inch of space to fill. Finally, though, I had to let it go, and, surprisingly, I was okay with that.