What
came back was several years ago. Maybe
more than “several,” depending on how you reckon that word. It was before high school, before sitting in
a desk all day, before riding the bus on cold mornings. It was when math was in the living room and history
was in the study, and English was everywhere, all the time, wherever I had a
book. It was at least eight years ago,
which feels like a very short forever.
Our
backyard was full of trees. Not forest
full, but there were quite a few, and leaves from the neighbors’ trees fell
into our yard as well. We raked the
leaves without being asked to, Beth and I, first into towering piles that
cradled you when you leapt in. Then we
had a better idea. We pulled our rakes
through the leafy debris and made paths, roads and side streets and
back-alleys, and connected them in a labyrinth.
Everything was delineated by the leaves.
I think we spent hours at it.
There
were two principal rakes, although if we’d looked in the garage or the shed we
might have been able to scrounge up another.
One was red and wooden and worked well.
The other was green, metal, rusted and less effective, and it complained
audibly when you used it. I especially
hated to hear it used on the brick patio, as it occasionally was, to clear away
the leaves that fell closer to the house.
There, it was painful to my ears.
On the lawn it was merely obnoxious.
I think I usually tried to leave that rake for Beth.
It
was starting to be cold, to which we owed the ever-increasing amounts
of fallen leaves, but raking kept us warm, and when we stopped for breaks,
running through our leaf-maze kept our blood pumping. This was back when the enormous half-hollow
oak still dominated the yard (before its hollowness had caused worries that strong
winds would send it onto the house, which is why it was, to my dismay, later
chopped down). It was like a skyscraper,
a very friendly, organic one, and our streets wound cheerily around it in
pleasant swirls. Our city began to get
sparse in the northwest corner of the yard, where fewer trees left fewer leaves,
but the network of leaf-streets grew dense and complicated in the shadiest
parts. For obvious reasons.
Sometimes
we’d realize that a new development was passing dangerously close to an
already-established highway, and then we’d have to redirect traffic. Sometimes it was a simple matter of marking
out a connecting passage. Sometimes an
excess of building materials had to be laboriously raked through the streets to
the edge of town, where it was repurposed as a country road that snaked away behind
the hedge. The fun of it was not knowing
ahead of time how the town would change as it morphed into a city. We worked on it for several days, until it
became quite the thriving metropolis.
Every afternoon when we returned after lunch, new leaves had fallen and
had to be cleared from the roads and put to use constructing new ones. At its most complex, the leaf city was a
glorious sight to behold.
Then
came the lawnmower. It chewed up our
streets and spat them back out in abstract patterns. It left brown confetti in swirls on the
grass. It demolished our hard work in a
matter of hours, and what remained was too finely ground to be used to
rebuild.
I
kicked though ground-up leaves on my college campus, and I remembered . . .
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