"Raking Leaves"

A confession: I hate doing yard work.  An admission: I have complained about and dodged yard work so much that my loving spouse has reduced my sentence to two days a year. Once in the spring and once in the fall.  An explanation: we have agreed to allocate a part of our discretionary income to paying people to cut the grass, shovel the snow, deal with the landscape. So, the money and time you spend fishing or hunting or camping, I spend on avoiding hard labor. So sue me.

But, today is one of the two days.  I anticipated this day all week, like the week before you know you have get a root canal. You cannot stop thinking about it. And now the day is here.  Look, I know you are thinking, “Oh poor baby” or “Cry me river, you wimp”, but, really, this is cutting into my time I should be reading and writing. Or golfing.  Or watching football. But today is here, and I need to face the reality that hours from now I will be sore in places I forgot I had muscles, and there will be blood shed, I fear, or at least blisters.

I need to stop writing now. I need to get out there and attack the dead and decaying stuff in my yard. I have someone standing at the door with two rakes in her hands looking at me with this strange, sinister smile.  “Here we go, honey.”  To prepare myself; to give my mind something on which to focus; to give this day some redeeming value, I will do my utter best to channel this poem:

Raking Leaves

There is something soothing about the scrape of a rake,
the rhythmic process of pulling dead leaves,
bending to pick them up, dumping them
in curbside lawn bags,
something soothing about the way the sun
warms your hair one of these last
seventy-degree days as you labor past
soreness in your arms, until you forget
emails to send, reports to file,
take-home work you left at the office,
until you forget the splendid mums will shrivel,
the tree that sheds now will wear nothing soon,
and you will curse the cold.

Brian Fanelli
Source: Waiting for the Dead to Speak from inward/outward