Intro

An acre of leaves is a lot of leaves to rake.

When I was a kid, my parents bought a tiny cinderblock cabin and two and a half acres of land in rural Pennsylvania, not far from my mother’s family’s farm. Half of it was forest and half was grass and meadow. My father, having grown up poor during the Depression, was frugal to the core, which meant the unpaid labor—me—had to mow the lawn with a hand mower (a manual push model at first!) and rake the leaves off the grass with, well, a rake.

Summer’s annoying gnats and relentless humidity disappeared with the arrival of fall, and I didn’t mind the chore. Raking appealed to my sense of order, the pile to my sense of accomplishment. Before long, the heap was four or five feet high, and I would eye it from a distance, rake in hand, like a contented homesteader who’d just chopped the last chop on their