Leaves, leaves

If I had doubted the coming of fall, I do so no longer! I spent two hours today raking leaves. This is a picture of the leaves I raked up in the driveway. You can get a sense of the size by the baseball hat on the right. It is only a three day accumulation, since I raked it clean on Sunday afternoon. I also raked the backyard, or at least some of it. It took 5 wheelbarrow loads to clean up that pile, and another three for the back lawn piles. Whew!

I love the smell of drying leaves - sort of crisp, sweet - sort of indescribable. I haven't smelled it in years though, because the leaves on the live oak trees (the majority tree in Austin) don't fall in Autumn, and they don't smell like maples. When we went to Ithaca the other week, I mentioned the smell, and Benjamin said that he had never smelled it at all - that's what comes of growing up in an area with no deciduous trees! That smell of maple leaves transports me back to childhood, and fun of "helping" my parents clean up the yard. Dad would load up the wheelbarrow with leaves, and I would ride on top back to the compost pile. Grass clippings were another good cushion in the wheelbarrow, but a bit messier, since they got all over and in all your clothes. One of my favorite family pictures is one we used for a Christmas picture one year, posed behind a giant pile of leaves.

It is almost Halloween - not one of my favorite holidays any more. When I was a kid it was great, because dressing up was fun, and my mom made my costumes - I was a pilgrim one year, Laura Ingalls one year - and they were reusable for make-believe, and I got lots of free candy. Now, I am not as interested in dressing up, or my costume imagination has dried up, or something, I am really too old to go get free candy, and I am not much for parties. But, I do love pumpkins. I am a bit ambivalent about carving them, since my designs never turn out as I picture them, and I think that pumpkins are pretty, just as they are. Anyway, here is the pumpkin, as yet uncarved, that I bought over the weekend and put on our porch as seasonal decoration: