The Rake's progress...

We can not get over how many leaves our lovely lush oak trees had been harboring over the Summer... that is until they blanketed the ground! Not some light flimsy blanket either, but akin to one of those heavy, bulky feather eiderdowns of long ago. Not one blanket either, but several blankets being laid down in succession. That damn rain doesn't help - it only escalates our problem, bringing down extra leaves and making the act of raking even harder.

We attempted to rake these leaves... and rake... and rake. We bought a tarpaulin to shift the leaves to the forest at the back of our property. We moved the leaves... moved some more... moved yet more. We built our own Rocky Mountain range of leaves - and with leaves from less than a quarter of our garden!

We sighed and started to remember the number of leaves one had to rake in an apartment: a few minutes to vacuum errant Christmas tree needles and a moment to clean up the leaves dropped from a vase of flowers. Ahhhh... them were the days.

What on earth possessed us to buy 2½ acres liberally peppered with leaf producing machines. Caveat emptor and all that - but why on earth did no one warn us about the hours... nay, days and weeks of raking ahead of us?!