Too Much Rake, Not Enough Ravine

I was just raking the leaves out front of the house. It looks like the three Birch trees have recovered from the assassins parading as aborists three years ago who turned the trees into naked goal posts. The leaves this year came on like a deluge. I snapped my rake handle half-way through the job and spent the rest of the time raking with a tool more suitably sized for a hobbitt.

Nonetheless, I finished the job stooped over. Raking the leaves reminded me of when, as a kid, we would drag the leaves from our gigantic oak tree out front, to the ravine down the block. The really cool thing was that after enough of our neighbors deposited their leaves in the huge gulf, there was a cushion of ten to fifteen feet on the floor of the ravine to absorb us jumping youth like leafy pillows.

We would get a running start from twenty feet or so and rev ourselves out into the air and for that brief moment of weightlessness, where time stood still and the funny feeling would rise in our guts, we would drop twenty-five feet down into the leaves. We would get up unscathed to jump again and again until the weariness forced us to quit.

I recall my friend losing his P.F. Flyer shoe and his dog Leather, a mix of German Shepherd and Collie, crawling through the leaves.  Good memories. I don't recall the last time I jumped into a pile of leaves. I miss it...

Jesus said that we should come like a child. I think he would concur that we should run and jump like a child too.