Tuesday, November 9, 2010

Leaves, leaves, go away!

I love living in the country for so many reasons.  At this time of year, I especially love it when I see all those suburbanites wrestling their leaves.  Here on the farm, leaves are free to blow where the wind takes them.   We will rake up a few big piles to simply jump in for some fun, but that's as far as it goes.  That's the way I like it.  I am not a fan of bagging leaves.
Finding volunteer opportunities for our family can be rough.  We want to help others, but finding time and place that fits with our schedule and ages of our kids isn't easy.  This year, we found an activity we can do.  An announcement in the bulletin at church was calling for families and groups to sign up to help elderly folks in the parish clean up their yards.  You'd think we would learn our lesson to always ask questions and do research before jumping in to anything.   But no.  We signed up, figuring we could easily take care of someone's yard. 
We were assigned to help a lovely widow.  We took one look at lovely widow's yard, and I almost cried.  She has a double lot with more trees than I've ever seen squished into one place.  We didn't need rakes.  We simply stood in the middle of the yard in leaves up to our knees and started bagging.  An hour and a half and 25 bags later, you couldn't tell we had even been there.  Lovely widow said that her son was going to help, so I felt better.  Found out lovely widow's son is in his sixties.  We're going back today to work some more. 
Hopefully we'll get everything cleaned up before the mowing needs done in the spring.