The other night it was very windy, which brought down most of the remaining leaves from the birch, and many others from the neighboring yards.
I swept the leaves into a pile and remembered how when I was a kid, I — like most kids I suppose who get the opportunity — loved to jump around in the big piles of leaves my father and I would rake up around the trunk of the maples in the front yard, especially if the dogs could join in, which they sometimes did without running away because they seemed to love playing in the leaves, too. I can still remember what it was like to be completely buried, and maybe even a little bit suffocated under the leaves, and how it smelled of dirt and mildew and how only a few dappled specks of light penetrated to the depths where I lay with my heart pounding.
As often happened when I as a kid, I reached a point when I decided that the normal or usual frolicking around was not enough, and I set about making a fort out of wood and boxes, but one that was completely disguised by the leaves, so that the pile looked even more enormous than it otherwise would have. In my mind it was the biggest (and scariest) pile of leaves in the history of the universe. I sat in the dark and felt happy as through a secret peephole I watched people walk by on the street, certain that they had no idea that they were being observed by a leaf creature hidden only a few feet away. In retrospect, I think it’s fair to say that I was weirdly, abnormally obsessive between the ages of ___ and ___, a condition that I now see as presaging another condition I was trying to sublimate, albeit in the most unconscious ways.
On this day, I didn’t feel the need to roll around in the leaves. Instead I threw them over the wall into the vacant lot next door, which I imagine is going to have very rich soil if/when the property is ever renovated.
In terms of my memories of being a kid, when — at least as I think about it — you sort of drift along, grasping at things that please you (or suspect should please you) and shying away from things that don’t, it’s good to remember what you did, but even better to figure out why.
