In the 20 some years we’ve lived in our town, it has become a much noisier place.

Nowadays, it feels like the four seasons are snow blower, wood chipper, lawn mower, and leaf blower. Complementing these soloists are a chorus of trash trucks, leaf sucker vehicles, Fedex and Amazon delivery vans, and the 24/7 roar of Md. Route 200, a six-lane toll road to nowhere that opened some 10 years ago that is just a 15 minute walk from our front door.

Our town has an ancient ordinance, widely ignored, that prohibits power tools before noon on a Sunday and yet the most contentious issue in recent memory has been a proposed bike and walking path that would connect our town to a shopping center less than 1 km away that could only reduce car trips.

But what I wanted to write about today is raking leaves.

Washington Grove is nick named, “The Town Within a Forest” so as you might guess, we have trees. Lots of them. Lots of maples and even more oaks and each one of those trees (except the dead ones) have leaves. Lots of them. In autumn they turn red and orange and yellow. One might call them pretty.

Then they fall off the trees.

In prior years, we had a guy who cleaned them up for us. Last year I made him rake them by hand (yes, I paid him more to do it that way) but we felt so bad watching him struggle with the mountains of leaves that we decided to do it ourselves this year.

Can you imagine a world where the sounds of yard work were hand raked leaves, hand shoveled snow, and manual push mowers snick-snicking away at a languid lawn of deciduous weeds — like mine?

I can but only because I was born into just such a world long ago in the middle of the previous century.

The soothing sound of a rake on leaves. Shreet, shreet, shreet. Like a lullaby.

Each leaf is in itself insubstantial; together they are a formidable force and when wet with rain, they are indomitable.

Raking is slow, meditative, and seemingly never-ending work. Like life. Yet like a life, the raking does end.

Here’s a poem about autumns —natures’s and mine.

Windrows

Sisyphus forsake your stone,

and help me rake these leaves,

for I've an autumn afternoon

and you eternity.

Discarded litter of an oak

I planted in my prime,

we'll sweep into mountains

higher than Zeus has known.

My labor's end is drawing near

gathering summer's dross

for men or gods to burn in piles

or mulch in shallow graves.

Then you and I will drink neat

the remnants of the day

and sip the bourbon twilight

till we rejoin infinity.

Summer's Dross