In the spirit of fall, I shall tell ye ole tale of the triumphant gathering of leaves! To all of you Shakespearian types out there, don't get too excited. It's not a meaningful tale at all. It's a story about a bunch of dumb kids who drove their parents crazy and probably embarrassed them in front of the entire neighborhood year after year.
I only remember doing this with a few of my closer siblings, but the rest of them probably did it before I can remember too. In fact that's probably one of the very valuable things we learned from them. Such wonderful role models they were. Obviously this story is about us gathering leaves, but the less obvious part is how. First we would rake our own lawn to begin our pile in the front yard. Pretty obvious, right? Next we would move on to the neighbor's curbs. We would go around the cul de sac with garbage bags and fill our bags with any leaf piles we found on the curb. Still seems pretty normal. But then, once we had cleaned the curbs, we would go to the houses with unraked leaves and ask if we could rake their leaves up. When we were done, they would say thank you and ask how much we wanted them to pay us. We were baffled. Money? We just want the leaves! The golden, crispy, precious leaves! What was money compared to that?! Silly grown ups. They just didn't understand.
Once we had a sufficient pile about the height of a sky scraper and the width of Texas, we would then burry ourselves (sitting upright) completely so that we could just barely see the street, but no one on the street could see us. And of course, the grand finale was jumping out at unsuspecting pedestrians. Our poor parents.
